One of the hardest things to point out to anyone is that even when they are right they can be wrong. How you deal with being right is easily as important as how you deal with being wrong. It’s obvious online. All one needs to do is go to message boards, blog comments or where ever else people are having conversations on the web. The level of meanness and sniping is appalling. Often times you could just delete a line or a sentence from their comments and you’d have a totally reasonable and valuable comment, however many want to get in that last little mean swipe. No reason for it really, apparently they are just mean people.

Beyond the web another obvious way people enjoy harming others is when they feel their value system is somehow offended. I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched as people use their faux-morality to justify treating others like pariah. Self-righteousnesses seems to give some people the right to break all their rules of human decency as long as the people they attack don’t share or live up to their belief system. Certainly these days we can see this global problem. In politics candidates speak of their own high mindedness while spewing acrid comments about their competition. Fundamentalists of every stripe justify their bad behaviors in the name of their own moral compass.

Then of course we have the advent of “Swift-Boating” as it’s come to be called. Where people will say just about anything in a public forum to tear down someone else for whatever gain they want to achieve. To them winning public opinion is of course justification of their views. Of course just because you win strangers over with good oratory does not make you right. The saddest part of that of course is it leaves the victim of the attacks with two bad choices. First, they can take a higher road and refuse to fight back. The problem in our modern society is that if you choose not to get down in the mud it is often perceived as an admission of guilt or at the very least a sign of weakness. A great example of this going on right now is the ongoing battle of the stars between Heather Mills and McCartney. Feeling wronged she felt obliged to take her battle public and scream to the high hills. McCartney made the choice to stay quiet and let her run wild. Thing is, in the end I’m sure we will find as is often the case they were at least equally guilty of something. However, the fact of Mills desperation for public justification makes her just a bit suspect. To my mind, the bottom line is that their personal life was really no ones business.

The other option for the person who is being assaulted of course is to fight back in kind. In US politics it has been decided after the last election that sniping back is the only way to address a public attack. Thing is, as these “he said, she said” battles progress there is almost no way to sort out reality from fiction. It rarely even changes minds. More often it just polarizes peoples opinions and makes both look bad. The victim of these assaults it seems is left to either look bad for fighting back, or look bad for not fighting back. Certainly a win for the attacker. (at least in the beginning) The loser of course is the public who buys into all this BS. The contradiction is obvious. The public hates meanness, yet penalizes people for not jumping in the fray, then penalizes them again FOR jumping in the fray. Strange really.

Thing is, as much as we hate to admit it, we learn from all these folks in the media. We tend to emulate their behaviors. Something I think we all have to keep in mind too as our sport grows. In some ways we are becoming more competitive recently. The online media has made it very easy for anyone to to rant freely when they have a beef to pick with someone. Suddenly their battle is telegraphed around the world for everyone to get their teeth into. A bad word by one person suddenly becomes fodder for message boards and open forums. There, in a soup of negativity and and an absence of facts, commenters spin a web of confused madness. It can get down right ugly. The fact is, we will always run into issues with others; Companies, business, partners, personal lives, you name it. The web makes it just too easy to leap before you think. Folks need to consider the consequences of taking their beef out for an airing. I think no matter how right we may think we are we can quickly become . . . wrong.

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