Welcome to November

Written By: Timothy Fish Published: 11/1/2007

November rolled in with a fog, not a literal fog, but a fog nonetheless. It was a thick fog, so thick that you couldn’t see anything except what was right in front of your face. Nothing else mattered; nothing else was good, only those things that were right there. November has arrived and there is a whole month of it.

There are a number of blogs that I read on a daily basis. Shortly after I got up this morning, I went and started reading. I read the first blog. There was plenty of stuff that I could have agreed with, but what did I do? I picked out the one statement that I disagreed with the most and commented on it. I’m right; no one else matters; it is November. I read some more blogs. I came to another blog that had a statement that I disagreed with. I left a comment on that one. I’m right; no one else matters; it is November. I continued reading. There wasn’t a single new post that I thought was any good. I saw another post that I thought was terrible. I considered what to say about it. I’m right; no one else matters; it is November.

Just because it is November is not a good reason for me to offend every friend I have on the Internet. Maybe I am right, but then it could be that when December 1 comes I will look back and say that was stupid.

More than ever, the Internet is a community. One of the things about living in a community is that there will be people with whom we disagree. While there is nothing wrong with stating one’s opinion, we must be careful about how we state that opinion. In face to face conversations we spend a lot of time nodding our heads and providing affirmation that we agree. When we disagree, it is much less of an issue than on the Internet where we may not be providing the indication of agreement about other things. When we wake up in November and go slam the first person we can find, that is an even worse thing to do.

As with any community, it is necessary to take an active part in the community if we want to be noticed. We can visit websites every day, but if we do not comment on what we see then people won’t notice us. We will be nothing more than an ip address and a statistic. Still, there are times that we really need to keep our hands away from the keyboard. When November rolls in like a heavy fog and we are in a bad mood, we need to be quiet. We may be right and they may be wrong, but we need to be very careful how we say it.

Commenting only when we should can be difficult. Let me just say to anyone that I have already offended or that I am going to offend this month, please be patient with me. I’m in a very bad mood and I really don’t mean to be so inconsiderate. Give me a month or two before you become too angry, because then it won’t be November.