Crank It, Baby!
by John Weckerle
Just a little over a month ago we published an article written by Margarita Mercure Hibbs on the subject of cancer and the upcoming Estancia Valley Relay for Life. This is a cause that your editor and his business have supported in the past, and will continue to support in the future.
Rather surprisingly, we got a nasty response from somebody who signed on as “Abe” and made some particularly inflammatory statements. Our response was to inform Ms. Hibbs immediately – and to essentially accuse Abe of not being who he said he was and challenge him to back his allegations up. We thought our response was, frankly, more snide than any response that has ever come out of this operation. Even with a guarantee of anonymity, Abe was unAble (or unwilling) to respond. Armed with what information we had on Abe, we we did a little digging, but did not obtain anything that would be worth publishing. Ms. Hibbs did a very good job in putting the intrepid Abester in his place, and we agreed with everything Ms. Hibbs said. Now, we want to be clear: having essentially come to the conclusion on the basis of our perfunctory investigation and Abe’s writing style that Abe was nothing more than a crank – and having essentially called him a liar and issued a clear taunt on the opportunity to elaborate anonymously – we considered the matter closed. We have had some communication to the effect that there are those who do not consider it so, and that we should have taken the matter further. With nothing to follow up on, and with Abe’s nonsense definitively refuted, there seemed – and still seems – that there was little left to do.
We can see how people would be angry about what Abe had to say. Toning down our own response frankly took a heck of a lot of doing. We try, but do not always entirely succeed, to avoid too much angry expression here. We try to be at least a little courteous to those with whom we disagree – and we do tend to write off those who just rant without any logical argument. We have done that in Abe’s case, and would like to suggest that we all stop giving him the attention he was seeking.
2 Responses “Crank It, Baby!”
Unfortunately, I’ve also noticed similar crankiness (albeit less public) on the same topic and am hard put to understand underlying rationale. I can’t help wondering what next. Orphans for target practice?
Anger is a very poignant state of emotion, and some people have a strong appetite for it. Couple it with a penchant for righteous indignation and a need to be noticed, and you get the sort of people who will badmouth anything just to satisfy their urges. There’s a a bell curve for almost everything, including emotional maturity, and it’s just a reality that the left-hand side of that curve is simply more noticeable. Few people notice when somebody is calm and rational, but everybody notices when somebody blows their stack. Indignation over the salaries, etc. simply belies a lack of familiarity with how large nonprofits work. The rest just seems to be anger.