Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2015 08:17:28 -0400
From: Paul Tierney
Subject: Chatham County Troll Eradication Program
Trolls!! Who wants ’em?! Not many, I’d guess. Maybe even trolls don’t like other trolls. Or themselves. But might trolls serve a purpose – perhaps a purpose even they are not aware of? (I _know_ you are’t supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, so don’t even think about calling me on it, you grammar trolls!) Trolls under bridges keep travelers alert, perhaps saving them from highwaymen or Robin Hoods. Trolls frighten children (or is it the story-tellers who do the frightening?) into better behavior (did that ever work? I doubt it.) (Aren’t you getting tired of the parenthetical comments? I am, but whatcha gonna do?)
Maybe trolls help us remember that below the surface of polite conversation and neighborliness there lurks some darker, not-so-nice stuff that we’d prefer to ignore. For all our agreeableness we _don’t_ all agree on everything, or even most things. In their cloak of anonymity trolls are willing to say what we don’t. Trolls take on messy topics that the rest of us usually only talk about with people who agree with us – things like taxes, personal freedom vs. common good, abortion, racism, gun rights, climate change, personal responsibility vs. compassion, city dwellers vs. country folk, etc. When was the last time you had a conversation about one of those topics with someone on the other side. No, not that argument you had with what’s-his-name yesterday where neither of you listened to the other – that’s not a conversation.
We want trolls to be more polite, civil, logical, open-minded, respectful. And they might even be more effective if they were. Maybe, maybe not. But if the messenger shouts in a quiet room, disrupts polite conversation, calls names, doesn’t listen to others,… does that make her/his message wrong? No. The message and the messenger arrive together but are often unrelated. The troll might be bringing us a priceless gift wrapped up in smelly garbage. Are we going to throw that gift away because it wasn’t presented with store-bought wrapping paper and a bow? Well, are we??
There’s at least one more problem with Troll eradication programs. If we _could_ somehow rid ourselves of our troll, the second-most annoying person (do trolls have understudies??), would suddenly become the obvious candidate for banishment. And then the third-most annoying person, etc. until only Gene was left. Or maybe we’d each have our own individual chatlist for only like-minded (ack! I hate that term) people. Oh, that’s FaceBook. So, you see where we’d end up? No, I don’t either.
Good morning,
Paul