A New Standard of Internet Civility: Choose Joy

We live in an amazing world, but a severely divided one.

If you are reading these words, if you’re someone who regularly browses the internet, enjoys writing emails or commenting on message boards, you are almost certainly among the luckier half of people on the planet. Maybe the luckier third, or even hundredth. While you and I sit here in polite electronic discourse, talking about our favorite movie or what social networking site has become passe, we do so as someone somewhere is going to bed without enough food in their belly.

I’m not advocating that you feel guilty about your luck. But I think that we should be conscious of it. I think we should celebrate it. I think we would all do well to remember that no matter how angry we may be at “BruinsFn67,” we are blessed to be in an economic and social situation where we can read his words, free from persecution, starvation or danger.

The next time you go to your favorite e-watering hole or, by extension, have a discussion about all the wonderful forms of entertainment we have nigh embarassingly constant access to due largely to where we were born and who we were born to, why not do so with a spirit of joy? With a sense that no matter how starkly we may disagree, we are mindbogglingly lucky to be able to do so?

And if you are filled with so much misguided anger or plain old glumness that you’re ready to lash out at the commenter above you, why not take a moment and spend that energy trying to make the world a little better for someone else not quite as lucky? I promise you’ll feel better about it the next day.