I think the heat is making a lot of people downright cranky.
Why do I say that?
The recent comments we’ve had to look through on our website (www.cowichanvalleycitizen.com) and Facebook.
There’s always a certain amount of incivility. Our online filters remove a portion of these when people decide they’re going to swear or refer inappropriately to body parts. Others we remove manually for being racist or needlessly rude. Still others I sometimes remove under my personal heading of “don’t be a jerk.” It’s that last one that I’ve been really, really tempted to use a lot of late.
The quality of an increasing number of the comments posted lately has been low. There’s a lot of snide or mean, a lot of off-the-cuff dismissive. It’s the kind of thing that shuts down real conversation rather than promoting it. It’s the flip response rather than the thoughtful one. Some people seem to have lost their sense of humour entirely.
We see it out in the real world, too. One of my reporters said a restaurant server told her that people have seemed really impatient recently. And unfortunately it’s the kind of heat that hazes your mind a little and makes you prone to mistakes, which then leads to irritation on someone else’s part.
Then there was a woman who sent me a small letter to the editor, but didn’t include a name signed or a town she hailed from, or, at least it was not in a format that appeared on my email. When I asked for this information she descended into an increasingly unnecessarily rude tone. (An aside: please do remember to attach your name and the town you’re from when sending in a letter to the editor.)
It’s the kind of heat that has car horns honking a little more often, and tempers flaring a little more easily.
And my finger hovering a little more readily over the “don’t be a jerk” hide button (hey, I’m not immune).
So perhaps it’s a great time to take that extra moment before you hit send. Before you honk the horn. Before you snap at the server. Just take a breath and if you’re feeling sweaty, cool down a little with some ice water or turn on the fan. Will your action make things better, for you and everyone else out there? Or are you just going to be left feeling more uncomfortable and boiling, perhaps inspiring someone else to respond in kind?
It doesn’t sound like the heat wave is over for the summer just yet, so we might as well start adapting and finding ways to make our lives as pleasant as possible. I know I’d appreciate it as I look at our Citizen sites.
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