Snarky Remarks

I realized tonight that on a couple of boards I read online that people will say just about anything on the Internet and feel totally confident that it will never get back to the people they are slamming. It is as if they honestly think they can't hurt someone if they get snarky on the boards.

Fact is, some of the things that are said are beyond rude. They are so insensitive that they smack of total hypocrisy. Tonight, I read one where a woman was belittling her son and trying, through her nasty comments, to bring validity to the remarks of another person who aired her 'dirty laundry' regarding her own child.

I only have one question for these women: What on earth are you thinking?

The idea that we are not responsible for the statements we fling out into the cosmic void of the Internet is so blatantly false that it is laughable. We live in a day and time where every literal keystroke can be detected and printed out for the whole world to see. And there is no such thing as total anonymity on the world wide web, no matter what people are inclined to believe.

For every person who launches verbal venom, there is a hacker who can, and often does, find a way to use those remarks to their advantage when the time comes. It is all about personal expediency and power.

What I have to wonder is how that child feels when those remarks come back home to roost?

If the parents feel confident sharing them with total strangers, I am quite sure that the poor children in question have heard those cutting remarks so frequently that they have suffered under the unreasonable expectations of a parent who forgets that they are not perfect themselves and neither is or will be their child.

And I cannot believe that the child, even when they reach the age of adulthood, will EVER forget that their parents' love was totally conditional upon whether they met some invisible standard of worthiness imposed upon them by someone who is not a fit judge of their heart.

We don't all mature or progress at the same rate and the things that are good for me in my own life may simply never be something that suits your God-given talents and interests. We can't all be the same!

We need the professionals as much as we need the ditch diggers. We need the beauty stylists as much as we need the street sweepers. There is no human endeavor that is worthless if someone puts all they have into reaching their full potential.

While all parents have expectations for their offspring, there comes a time where the parent MUST step back and let them figure it all out on their own, even when and especially because they WILL make mistakes. We can't sheild them forever from life. To do so creates a crippling condition that is a greater wound than letting them fall down once in a while in order to learn to get up and keep trying.

I only hope that someday, the snarky women find themselves in a position to realize that they do damage to a relationship where they devalue their children because they are not like and cannot be like themselves. I honestly don't believe God sent us all here to be the same.

If that were the case, there would have been no need for us to all be different. We could have used Cliff Notes and just watched one man and one woman make all of the mistakes and learn all of the lessons just so that we could take the final and everyone could pass with 100%.

God bless those children who don't have their earthly parents' unconditional love in their life. Because it is most certainly God who has that love in abundance and who can see so far beyond our limited understanding as to just who and what these marvelous people truly are. And it is God who can heal them and make them have the strength through him to rise above the petty behavior of those who should love them, but don't.