What did I learn this weekend? I learned the importance of listening.

I learned that we are losing our ability to connect with one another as human beings or stand in their shoes. I learned once more that the Internet is a breeding ground for anger and social disconnection as well as connection and community. It is increasingly a medium of outrage and judgment. I learned that many people have lost touch with the very idea of empathy and compassion and do not, in fact, know how to practice either.

I learned that our wonderful love of animals, like almost any unchecked thing involving emotion and perspective, can become a force for harm as well as good.

I learned we are losing perspective about our own world, placing animals too far above the welfare and well-being of people, or even of the earth itself. That we are forgetting that animals and people are both entitled to the most basic rights of decency and dignity. We cannot love one while hating the other, we cannot ease the suffering of animals while ignoring the suffering of human beings.

I learned that technology is sometimes incapable of helping us see the mysterious nature of human beings and their relation to things, and that it often addresses one wrong only to create another.

I learned that outrage in the digital world is an end unto itself, apart from any just cause or rational purpose.

I learned something about who I am. And who I am not.

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I had an important week, I did not know when I wrote about Cecil and Dr. Walter Palmer from Minnesota that I would strike so deep a chord, I found the mix of ideology, theology, animals and compassion a perfect mix for me, right up my alley. I also didn’t know that when I wrote about Internet Mob Justice, that I didn’t have to ponder the mob, the mob came to me.

My messages broke all kinds of records for hate, anger, disconnection, outrage and the most astounding kinds of rationalizations and mis-information. I never imagined that a column suggesting we might be more compassionate to people who behave in ways we hate could possibly be viewed as heretic and offensive.

The messaging goes on still, from Friday to Sunday, I wrote three pieces about compassion and Internet justice, got more than 1,000 messages and had three different pieces go viral. Wow.  That is a lot of response. Many death threats, some assaults on my computing system.

All in all, it was nothing but a gift to me, there are moments in a writer’s life where you are given the opportunity to decide who you really are, where you stand, what you believe, how you will stand in your own truth. It felt good and strong.

A defining time for me, and I have been writing online almost from it’s inception. It doesn’t make me wise, of course, just older. What stands out in all of this dialogue, all of these messages, all of this anger?

First, outrage. I think social media has spawned a vast community of outrage addicts, great hordes of the outraged who are continuously and vocally outraged at many different things. The left is outraged about the right, of course, the right is outraged about the left. Republicans are outraged at President Obama, he is outraged at them. Farmers are outraged at animal rights activists, animal rights activists are outraged at just about everyone.

Dr. Palmer is a great gift to outrage, he could easily have been created for it. He is arrogant, cruel, oblivious and seemingly without character or morals or sympathy. For this  reason, countless people from all over have seen fit to deprive him of dignity or sympathy, they have terrorized his family, destroyed his business, invaded his privacy, stolen his personal and financial data, threatened his patients and employes and driven him into hiding.

The message I heard all weekend was, good, he deserved all that and more.

Over the course of several days, hundreds, if not thousands, of people told me that this punishment was not nearly good enough, he must be pursued to the end. More than 100 people in the last 24 hours said that what he did to Cecil the lion should be done to him. Nobody over the weekend even mentioned the slaughtered people in Charleston, the young women butchered in New Mexico, the nine people shot in Brooklyn. No one I conferred with could name a single person killed in any of the massacres of recent weeks.

Everyone knew every single detail of Dr. Palmer’s life – including many that were not true – and of Cecil’s death.

When I suggested that killing Dr. Palmer in the same way he killed Cecil suggested to me that the killers would be no better than he was, people took offense. Nobody wanted to hear it. “I’d change your message,” one person advised, “people might be more receptive.”

The internet is, of course, a great digital outrage machine. There, things to be outraged about  come in a steady stream, they are enthusiastically shared and tweeted and fumed about, and it we don’t ever have to even look the targets in the eye. It only takes a couple of seconds to express outrage, it is free, you don’t have to think about it or ever see or grasp the consequences. Battalions of trolls are ready to invade anyone’s personal life and destroy it. They took Dr. Palmer’s life and computing and social media world apart in minutes.

What stands out from the messages?

Several people said I erred in suggesting Jesus Christ would not want to destroy Dr. Palmer’s life and the lives of his wife and children. “Jesus marched on the Temple,” one woman said, “he loved animals and would have hated Palmer and tried to destroy him.”  She said the same was true for Gandhi. Many people agreed with her, cheered her on.

This surprised me,  I have read just about every book written about Jesus in recent years. I had trouble believing that people were using Jesus Christ as a rational for hatred and vengeance. I found this dispiriting. I didn’t foresee that anyone would seriously use Jesus  or Gandhi as a hiding place and screen for hating and pummeling people. I hope Jesus Christ is not,  in fact, looking down on them.

Two or three people said they were disappointed to see I was writing about Cecil and Dr. Palmer at all, “I have been reading your blog for a long time, and I don’t understand why you are writing about this. I enjoy the photographs and stories about your dogs and donkeys.”

“Oh, God,” said Maria, “I hope she isn’t trying to tell you what to write.”  She was, I said, she was. I told her if she thought my blog was only about cute animals and flowers, she had best move along.

Another person said she had looked up the meaning of “mob” online (“a crowd bent on or engaged in lawless violence”) and decided there was no Internet mob, I was imagining it,  no such thing could possibly exist. Someone told me that I was wrong in being disturbed by the anger and rage shown by online mobs, she had been posting about Dr. Palmer for days and had seen no anger and no  rage anywhere.

I was surprised at how few people read my post at, one after the other kept posting stories and comments about how awful Dr. Palmer was, how many horrid things he had done. It was a long series of declarations, there were few questions, little back-and-forth. People seemed in a trance, they couldn’t stop denouncing Dr. Palmer, even though no one was defending him. It felt like a fever to me. My piece had nothing, really, to do with all of that. “There is nothing you can do to him that would be too awful,” wrote Martha, “he should be disemboweled,  just like the old days. That would send a message.” Yes, for sure.

“I read the first paragraph of your post,” said another, “and I disagree with you. Dr. Palmer deserves whatever he gets. So do his children. Children are responsible for the sins of the parents.” I  hope this woman does not have children, if she does, I hope they never read her post.

It was an intense experience. I resolved to reply to as many of the posts as I could. By this morning, more than 1,500 messages had been posted in response to the pieces I wrote. There was considerable agreement, a lot of praise, but the overwhelming tone was great anger at my suggestion that Dr. Palmer might be treated as a human being worthy of dignity, no matter what he did in Zimbabwe. To me, that would honor the spirit of animals.

It was a remarkable dialogue about compassion and justice, about the boundaries of mercy and understanding, about the challenges and dangers raised by new technologies for communicating. Compassion, I argued, is hard, it means standing in the shoes of another. It means showing empathy for people we don’t like, not just people. we do.  I didn’t run across too many people who wanted to do that.

Compassion is not the ethos of Facebook and Twitter. In killing Cecil, Palmer seems to have forfeited the basic rights given to any killer, even the killers of children: to confront their accusers, to maintain their privacy, to get their day in court, be protected from vigilante mobs and prosecutors.

I will confess  that there was a moment when I had some Atticus Finch fantasies:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”  I wrote something like that, but the people posting were not nearly as impressed with me as the crowd down South was with Atticus: “You are mean and arrogant,” wrote Teresa, “I hate you and will never read your work again.”

For just a moment, until one person told me I was worse than Hitler and urged me to shut up and go die, I had fantasies of standing tall against the mob. I fantasized that people would say, “oh yes, of course, mobs are not good, we have no right to destroy this human being, even if he did kill a lion and is not a good man.”

This did not happen. Words only go so far, I guess, I felt that I was failing to find the right ones.

I resolved not only to stand firm, but to stay steady, as Atticus urged Scout to do when she felt enveloped by the  anger and hatred around her: “You just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t you let ‘em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change.”

So I did that, I tried fighting with my head for a change, I answered several hundred posts. By the end of the weekend I was so addled I started calling Red Julius and wasn’t sure where I lived. Julius was a long dead sweet Lab of mine, Red does remind of him, but still…

. When I first wrote one of the pieces, I got Palmer’s first name wrong, I called him “Arthur” instead of  Walter and this was pointed out to me for days as proof that I didn’t need to be listened to, that I am lazy and uncaring,  even though the mistake was corrected almost instantly.

And this, too, is the nature of the Internet.  Humans are not allowed to make mistakes, mistakes can never be forgiven.

A lot of amateur policemen and women out there, a lot of judges, editors,  prosecutors and juries. No one seems troubled by these non-digital issues like due process, or the awful specter of vast mobs of people using new technology to kill a person’s identity and sense of self  long before the police or the courts could possible get around to it.

Some stories are compellng to write about for all kinds of different reason. For me, this story is important because it tells me who I am, what I believe, where I want to stand in the world. I do not wish to stand with any mob, ever. And movements are not mobs. Perhaps it was Atticus Finch who taught me that, I read his story a hundred times when I was a kid.  In the hours or arguments over the weekend.

Atticus said many wise things, one of the wisest was that the one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience. We all have to figure out who we are and who we wish to be.

I told the women who suggested I soften my opinions on this issue in order to draw more support that I was good with my conscience, I was grateful to be on the side of perspective and compassion. I am proud to be trying to do what Atticus tried to do: look the mob in the eye (I can’t really see them either) and say this is what I believe, and I am going to stand here and stick with it. I did that. But it was a conceit to think that I am like Atticus or that this conflict is like a movie.

Mobs are frightening forces of primal nature, I am not sure I ever heard of anyone reasoning with one successfully. The very definition of a mob is that it exists beyond reason, just like a thunderstorm.

The truth it, is was much easier for me than it was for Atticus. (I wish I looked like Gregory Peck and had that voice.) I could be strong and clear from my Apple computer in my study, just as all those outraged people can be brave and punishing from their own living rooms. You, sir, are no Atticus Finch.

I do not think I changed many, if any minds, and no one changed mine. That is perhaps the nature of the time. But the people who messaged me did get me to think, and I hope I did the same for them. I’m not sure one can ask for anything more in the new world of remote communicating. When the media and digital worlds collide, humanity falters and fades, we live in the realm of social disconnection.

I felt I was standing with my idea of God all weekend, and that felt very good to me.

You know, the one who said in Peter: “Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.”

That one.  I don’t think he would be good with hacking into the cellphones of Walter Palmer’s children and putting their most personal messages online for all the world to look at and jeer.