A rough few days….

Everyone knows, it’s been a rough few days, but sometimes we learn.

Mahatma Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Last week my son got into an altercation with a girl at school.  He tripped and accidentally brushed up against her.  Apparently she wanted to call this an “assault.”

My son is 14, 6′ tall, and 175# – all LANK.  To say he’s kind of out of control when he’s doing things as simple as walking is the understatement of the year… I watch him trip over his feet no less than twice a day, and believe me, the denim bill in this household is HORRIFIC.

So he “gropes” her (her words) and she starts flaming him on facebook (thank god in private since they’re not FB frends)

We get a copy of EVERY email that goes into my son’s email account, and an actual txt message/page if it contains “certain terms”.  Handy parenting tool offered by my hosting provider.

So we start seeing these emails coming through.  When she started threatening to have her “guy friends” (who uses that term anymore) kick his ass we finally asked him about it.  (The whole time he was posting back that it was an accident and that he was sorry, etc)

It occurred to me, after a weekend of well-published but best forgotten emails/tweets/blogposts that it’s a *LOT* easier to say things onlline that you’d NEVER say to a person to their face.

Cyber-Bullying, Cyber-Stalking, etc. is becoming a real problem in this day and age.  I suspect it’s because it’s so easy to hide behind ones and zeros and forget that there are other people out there.

I think it’s also because we’ve learned, through our penchant for trauma and this stupid 24 hour news-cycle we all run in, we’ve learned not to trust people are take them at their word.

Thanks to people like “Balloon Boy” Heeney and others, our first instinct is to look at people with suspicion, replacing the emotion we used to experience.

Caring and compassion.

Whether it be a guy on the street corner claiming to be down on his luck, trying to feed his family (Is he really using it to buy beer/drugs) or soliciting donations for someone who has lost a family member suddenly, our first instinct is now to look for “the angle”  What are they trying to get out of it.

You know what?  Here’s how I look at it.  If you’ve got the $1 or $5 or whatever to spare, give it.  It’s *ALWAYS* better to err on the side of compassion for your fellow human being.  Even if it DOES turn out to be a hoax, *YOU* did the right thing by someone, and karmically that means something.  (Doing a good deed in the face of suspicion has to be worth something extra too.)

When Balloon Boy went up I took one look at the baloon floating through the sky, the shape, etc, and said to myself “There is no way there is a kid in that balloon.”

But that’s the key – i said it to myself.  When it did in fact turn out to be a hoax, I was justified in saying “I knew it” and all was good.

But when someone asks for a donation for a cause, I will *ALWAYS* err on the side of compassion.  After all, if it comes down to it and I or my family are in need, I’m hoping people will do the same.

Going forward, I’m going to try to be more…positive.  In this blog, on Twitter, and in life in general.  I’ve decided to stick around but I will *NOT* be here nearly as often any longer, I do have actual responsibilities, and this can’t be one of them any more.

Being the change…

Jesse