Nasty Or Nice

Two contrasting masks—sad and happy, tragedy and comedy—represent the theatre.

 

I’ll borrow them for now to show the contrasting reactions of people to those who are nasty and to those who are nice.

Since I joined a cyber group that reviews member-sites, my own has been reviewed almost 300 times. These reviews have been very uplifting and immensely helpful.

I thought all reviews were as positive as these because I have made it my personal policy to review only the sites I like. If I don’t fancy a site, I quickly exit and promise myself never to go back again.

But I happened to visit some members’ sites and was appalled at some of the nasty reviews posted there. Discouraged and downhearted, some of them lamented, “Why can’t people be more encouraging?”

My feeling is, if I don’t agree with a site’s beliefs, I have no right to impose my own. All my opinions are freely written in my own site anyway—whether visitors like it or not.

That, for me, is the essence of blogging. I think of a personal site as a home in a community, the blogosphere. It is the blogger’s home. He can decorate it any way he pleases. He can put anything in it—art or junk. He can turn it into a pig sty or a sanctuary. I’ve decided to make mine the latter. It is a place where grace is discovered, received—and shared.

Putting it simply, every blogging day, a blogger—like a citizen of a country—has two choices. Be nasty, or be nice. Here’s what some of my friends say about that:

“Why waste energy on being nasty when it is so much easier to be nice?”

Or, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t.”

That’s nice.