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I try to be a hopeful person and believe the best in people. It's not easy, but it helps to know so many wonderful people here who are smart, funny, kind and generous. They are enough to give you great hope in the future of humanity, and that would develop into a downright optimistic and exuberant attitude if I never left the presence of those people for the others who make up the bulk of humankind. This is where I begin to sink into despair.

The place where it's probably the worst is in comment threads online. I speak of that well-intentioned feature which lets everyone chime in on the merits of some video or have a reasoned, even-tempered debate on the issues raised by some news article. Unfortunately, I can't say that I've even once seen things play out that way. The best you can hope for is a smattering of inane, mindless praise. It really doesn't get any better than "Wooo!"

I shudder to speak of the depths to which things sink so often as to make that the rule and not the exception. It's hard to say whether the ignorance or the informed hatred is the more objectionable. You might thing that the darkest things which are given life in the mind of a man would be triggered by things like terrorism, immigration and the like. That is sadly not the case. The most animalistic, ignorant animus can be and often is sparked by nothing worse than a dog bouncing around on a trampoline.

I would like to say that I'm speaking of a slender minority, but I'm not sure that's true. It might be almost everyone. It's in our nature, I suppose. That's why we have civilization. It's supposed to force us into overriding the dark instincts and impulses which would otherwise govern our actions. Somehow it breaks down when we are writing short reviews of a cut-rate dvd player on the store's website.

Relatively speaking, the internet has been a part of our lives for almost no time at all, and so maybe we are still sorting out how to behave with each other in light of this technology. It would seem like common sense to act the same as we did face to face, but then common sense would also have dictated the end of the direct frontal assault after the appearance of the machine gun. I guess it'll take a while to suppress our hatred and ignorance once again.