At the risk of getting roped into another one of those online ‘mud marches,’ I have no choice but to post this while I can. As promised, I made a faithful effort to avoid blogs that I’ve had public disagreements with in the past. However, after browsing in bed over the last few days I came upon a post that has since then evolved into something that I could not, and would not let go, because I think that it is very important to remind all of us that what we do here in the blogosphere can be very selfish and insensitive at times.

I don’t even have to name names, but one blogger recently posted a thread that questioned the integrity of several individual’s work (on Black Confederates). Now please let me state that there is NOTHING wrong with intelligently questioning and/or criticizing other people’s work. This may even be a fair analysis, I don’t know enough about the subject to make a judgment. However, in this case one of these individual's children were shot and killed just two weeks ago.

Now I am sure that the blogger had no idea, so I sent a very short and friendly email to him kindly informing him of the tragedy and proposing that perhaps it would be in better taste to remove this individual from his list for the time being as he is a decent guy who is hurting beyond measure. I at no time questioned the validity of the post, just the timing as being poor. In essence, I was trying to protect both parties from a potentially uncomfortable moment.

Unfortunatley, here we are, two + days later... New posts and an update on the subject have gone up since then and yet this gentleman’s name and link to his website remains. Apparently the blogger has no sense of sympathy for a man who is grieving the loss of a child. I was very upset to find that my email had indeed been read (verified at 5:41 a.m. on AOL), and then totally disregarded. In fact, no reply was sent or action taken. Surely the increased web traffic hits alone will lead this grieving parent back to the source that publicly chastises the work that he shared with his son.

Perhaps I am over-reacting, but what kind of person does that? What kind of person ignores that? What kind of person believes that their opinion on a particular subject is so important, that removing someone’s name from a list in that post is beyond question? What kind of person would feel the need to disregard a grieving parent rather than compromise their own blog posting? Apparently this one does and as a Christian it makes it very difficult to forgive such uncompassionate behavior.

Critiques are good, challenges, questions, and the sharing of ideas and opinions are what blogging is all about. However, people at the other end of the pipeline are still people, and their feelings in times of tragedy should always be taken into consideration. Say whatever you want, flame me on the other blogger’s comments section. I don’t care. This isn’t about me.

We're better than that people. And in the grand scheme of life, none of our opinions really matter as much as we sometimes like to think. Just some food for thought friends. Let's be good to one another.