Bully or Vigilante?

Today I am talking about the problem with stirring up garbage... by discussing people who discuss things.  Is this hypocritical?  Maybe.  Will it help to stop a problem I see?  Hopefully.

There is a particularly nasty Twitter account going around right now.  For those of you who don't know, Twitter can be very anonymous.  As the idea behind Facebook is each person has their own profile where friends can then find them, Twitter is slightly different.  It is, more correctly, a microblogging site than a networking site like Facebook. 

In essence, you could be anonymous as you wanted to, just as I could be as anonymous as I wanted to be on here.  The two are very similar, except they differ in their approach to the generations.  Twitter is definitely a Gen Y thing as you can barely squeeze two sentences out in a post.  Blogging is close to essay length.  Being the old man at heart that I am, blogging is enjoyable to me. (Journaling, which is a "cousin" to blogging is not nearly as enjoyable because I crave people to read, think, review... I am a very public person who generally likes the audience).  Twitter is also very enjoyable because it is one thought... one moment... one phrase.

Going on the Twitter "feed" is a person who knows many people from my high school around my age and they tend to call out "convenient" Christians from behind the mask of Satan.  It has escalated to the a comical point in that there is counter accounts like Jesus trying to discredit the whistle-blowing Satan.

Talking to friends, most people see to be apathetic and occaisionally supportive of this person who "calls out" those who feel they live righteous lives, but who have done their own fair share of sinning, or so the allegations seem to imply.  My peers also seem to not mind because this account really holds nothing back on anyone, so it is, in a way, fair.  In addition, it is things that generally everybody knows, just a whole lot funnier from the anonymous face in the public square.

I won't linger on the question of cowardice or bravery... right or wrong... just a joke or way more... or even bully or vigilante... 

I will linger on the fact that it just rips me up.  To me it is excessive cruelty to the people accused, simply because it is not right when you are being shot at, but it is far worse when you are getting shot at in the dark.  It is a lonely place, compounded by the fact that it is even lonlier because the accusations are about alienation from God.  The internet is a public square held in a community-less space. While everyone reads and interacts, only the person sitting at the desk or on the couch deal with the pain, joys, triumphs and hardships of everyday life.  Very rarely do we see a support system appear to brace one another, to be real to one another, and to share in what we traditionally called life.  There it is just cyberspace.  Then to have the ways we have fragmented our relationship with the Father be the very hardship makes it even more difficult to find comfort in his grace. 

Hopefully, though, some will find even more comfort in his grace and forgiveness, and we must hope and pray for that. 

It also is horrid to me because when you have a secret that you want to die, or a public truth (which is just as hard to live with as a secret in many circumstances) that you want to see dissolve away from memory suddenly pop back up to many of your peers and friends, it suddenly comes back.  Not only does it reappear, but it comes back with a vengeance and it haunts you.  What was thought of as forgiven and forgotten is now back in our face with overwhelming conviction.  Again, how lonely we can make one another feel.

In a world as fragmented as ours, the last thing we need is to further fissure our small communites that we work so hard to build.  I hope that those reading this will think about how we do the same behind our masks of anonymity. 

The comments we say under the premise of, "Well, they'll never know".  Or the embarrassments we create under the banner of, "Well, it was funny!".  Or the stories we retell because, "In the end, it was better for Suzy to know what's going on with Tommy".

We all cross the line.  Not saying we shouldn't have confidants with which we can trust everything and more.  Rather, it is time that confidants stayed confidential.  More than anything, though, it is time we worked at healing our micro-communities instead of cracking them like glass.