Please Edit Your Rant

Occasionally I get sucked into reading the comments posted to various online articles. This is often a mistake. Some comments are thoughtful and interesting, even helpful, but many of them are just short (or not so short) rants. Even that might be excusable if the rant writers could spell and punctuate correctly. Hey, at least then their writing would look somewhat intelligent.

A few days ago I read a pretty interesting article about pet-friendly cities. I liked it. It was well written and informative. Then I read the comments, most of which were positive. There was one, though, that said something to the effect that the article was a waste of space, blah, blah, blah. The rant writer misused “to” (he really meant “too”) and made a couple other mistakes that I have mercifully forgotten. What a waste of space. I would have commented directly on his comment, but I was afraid he would either blow up my car or send me an expletive-laden message with multiple spelling errors. I don’t think I could handle either of those outcomes.

Speaking of violence, last week I wrote a short article about a kitten that was set on fire by some boys in Baltimore. While researching the story, I’d visited several news sites to read reports on the attack. There were, of course, comments posted on those sites, and many of them said something like “Those horrible kids should be beat up and burned too,” only the wording was a lot meaner—and a lot of it was spelled wrong. I won’t even tell you about the overtly racist comment. Let’s just say my Buddhist nature was slightly upset.

I would not want to censor anyone’s speech or stifle anyone’s opinion. Criticism is fine, anger is a normal reaction to some things, and people are entitled to their little rants now and again. But I think the world would be a better place if the ranters would write things that a) make sense b) are not blatantly mean-spirited and c) are spelled correctly. Or they could hire someone to edit their rants—but not me!