In another thread Greg Reibman recounted some horrific things that came is way as a result of his activities on V14.  I recounted a few that happened to me.

Unfortunately if you have any sort of public profile there’s a pretty good chance that eventually you will get some incoming flack.  That flack has two totally different flavors – mental illness and general rudeness.  Mental illness is tough.  You can become the target of all kinds of irrational attacks that really have little or nothing to do with your own behavior and it can be very disturbing.

My first exposure to this was years ago.  I was working to advocate for building the Upper Falls Greenway.  The Newton Tab did an article about it and had a photo of me and some quotes.  I woke up the next day to an email that had arrived in the middle of the night that accused me of “building an anti-semitic bike path”, and told me that “I would be welcomed into my afterlife by Hitler and Stalin”.  Clearly this was someone with mental issues but hearing these vague threats that mentioned my afterlife definitely spooked me.

I talked to one of the alderman that I knew to see whether he thought I should be nervous.  He had very practical advice.  He said if you receive a one-off communication, even if it was scary like this, he wouldn’t worry about it.  If you get more than one, or a long series of them – immediately go to the police.

What I learned from him though was that if you have any sort of public facing persona, at times you may receive all kinds of disturbing communications.  Much more common though than communications rooted in mental issues, is just plain rude communication – particularly aimed at elected officials and city staff.

Our elected officials are mostly people who have other day jobs and spend their evenings and free times working on our behalf.  However because we have a say in electing them, many folks feel like they are entitled to verbally abuse them in a way they would never do to a neighbor.  All of that can be compounded and be far worse when the communication is electronic.  Its a well know phenomenon that lots of people who are  usually very civil in person can suddenly be very rude when communicating electronically.

Of course that doesn’t just apply to elected officials and city staff.  Any reader of Village 14, Facebook threads, Next Door, Twitter, etc know that when people disagree over local political issues, things can often turn quite nasty in a hurry.

Village14 will soon be shutting down but the same advice goes for all the other social media.  If you disagree with something someone is saying and you feel passionate and/or angry, take a deep breath, slow down, think twice and see if you can get the same message across without the insults and vitriol.   This is not only just generally better for the whole discussion, it tends to make the point you’re trying to get across much more likely to be heard … its probably good for your blood pressure too ;-).  

Give it a try if you can.