While the internet has made us more connected, it has also made us more disconnected. How easy it has become to become inhuman.
So easy it is to hide behind our LCD screens and cast dispersions into the ether of cyberspace. How easy it is to post or forward a disparaging or embarrassing picture, place it on our Facebook page for others to see and laugh perhaps uncomfortably, comment with words that bite and sting; then click that little x and step away, forgetting that:
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Like when road rage strikes, it is easy to lose our sense of individual responsibility. We get caught up in the opacity of cyberspace, become disconnected, exhibiting behavior that we would not otherwise exhibit should we be face to face with a real person. Meanwhile those words or deeds we carelessly passed along hang in space, hauntingly, sometimes forever.
But perhaps we just need to be reminded:
"It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal."
In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized."
"If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
J. W. Goethe (1749-1832)
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