Starting a Fight to Stop a War

(Graphic stolen from this site)

by Minerva

I was once a part of an on-line forum. The subject matter isn't important, nor is the back door reason I joined the group. I joined this social media group about five years ago, maybe a little less, back when Facebook was not an issue and the only people on MySpace were teens.

I joined this on-line forum, made up mostly of women, though not entirely. We had a great time: joking, sharing photos, starting new threads (both germane to our overall topic and not), discussing things, planning crazy stuff we knew we'd never actually do, and getting to know each other personally. And fighting. You would NOT believe the fighting.

Or maybe you would believe it. Have you ever gotten dozens of women together for any great period of time? It's a frightening thought, I know, in the best of circumstances. Throw in one or two shit disturbers, maybe a troll or three, and the whole forum would go up in smoke in minutes. The site was shut down for days (once weeks) at a time fairly regularly.

But I almost always stayed out of it. I don't like fighting, and I'd either find someone neutral to play with or I'd leave. Unless, of course, I felt like stirring some shit myself, by poking at an intellectually challenged troll with a stick. Go ahead, Troll -- send up another lob for me. SMASH! Some things are just too tempting to resist.

Then one day I jumped into the fray with both feet. As I watched what was happening on the forum, I was so angry I was shaking. One very dim-witted poster (I'll call her Saint Ann) was passive-aggressively pushing a very painful button for another poster. Push, push, push. We begged her to stop. I e-mailed Saint Ann privately to say that I thought she might be unaware of what she was truly doing, but there was a lot more to the story and would she please stop? All of our efforts were not only dismissed by Saint Ann, but also actually served to strengthen her relentless attack.

Why do I care? I wondered. Why can't I walk away from this like I've ignored most of the others? Because someone is being hurt by this attack, someone I care about, was my answer to myself.

Nothing I knew to do was working. It was time for something drastic. I opened a new thread and typed in the title:

Dear Saint Ann: I Don't Like You

My head hurt, my throat hurt, my stomach hurt. Yes, I know how that thread title sounds, but I had a very specific reason for doing it: I was changing the subject. Now the focus was on ME, and how awful I was, or how brave, or wow, I never knew she was such a turd in the punch bowl or Really? Because I always knew she was a turd in the punch bowl!

I sacrificed my integrity on the board. Did it work? Pretty well. The pinnacle of nastiness was soon reached, and then died out. I was tarnished, but the focus had been removed from my friend. I certainly didn't do it alone, but I felt the need to throw myself under the bus for a friend. Dear Saint Ann: I don't like you. The follow-up words I chose were unheated and straightforward, with no name-calling or swearing, but they had to hurt, and I intended them to hurt. Yes, I was definitely a turd that day. And I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

I later apologized for my tactics, but not for my words. I made sure Saint Ann knew that I meant what I said. I held my tongue and kept my distance after that.

I left the forum a few months later, never to return. I miss a lot of friends there, but I do keep in touch with some of them. One or two read my blog and comment, occasionally.

The friend who was the original target of all of the ugliness quietly passed away last year, of the disease she had so fiercely guarded -- the same disease Saint Ann was trying so childishly to expose to the world. Wounds have healed with time but forgetting doesn't come so easily.

And this is why war will never end.