I had an interesting time writing yesterday about social media, my new lens photos, and the idea that they were harming the eyes of some of my readers eyes. I laughed a lot when I wrote it, and many people laughed when they read it. Some did not, of course, humor has no mother or home in a left and right world.

This isn’t to say I don’t get angry, I do. But I especially love irony and satire, it is often a part of my work.

Of course, life and fate has its own idea of a joke, and this morning, I found myself getting my eyes dilated in an opthamologist’s office, and my own issues were not simple.

I have to see a retina specialist in a few weeks, and we’ll see where we go from there.

I decided to make the grim doctor smile and asked him it if was possible that my eyes have been damaged by my new lens and its soft focus. He looked at me curiously, as if I had dropped out of the back of a horse  (I don’t think he jokes much in his office) and handed me some plastic tinted glasses so I could drive home without being blinded by the sun.

Good luck, he said.

I know it seems odd, but I am not comfortable discussing the details of my eye issues on Facebook or Twitter. If it develops into a grand and running drama, of course I will share what I can, as I try to do. I think it’s quite ironic that all of this happened in the week that my photography and people’s eyesight have come to the fore in my blog.

They say you get what you deserve, with dogs and lovers and people.

I got a lot of response to my piece.

One reader said I was too sensitive and judgmental, another said she was “boggled” at the idea I could be bothered by anyone’s suggestion that my photos were harmful to people’s eyes, or by people seeing my work in terms of their medical problems, a first.

Most people caught the irony of the situation,and there was a lot of chuckling. But of course a number of people think it is just wrong for me to challenge comments online that I find intrusive or uncomfortable.  The idea is if you share your life or put your work out there, you are asking for it, deserving of it, and have no right to complain or squawk.

This, in my mind, is how the Internet has become a cesspool of hostility, intrusion, invasiveness, rudeness, insensitivity and cruelty. I do not agree that someone in my position should be silenced by my willingness to be open, or needs to pay a price for it, and I will, as most of you know, speak out about it every chance I can.

If we all did, then the Internet would be a freer and more compassionate place, so might the country. Many women can testify about  the idea that people should be quiet when they are uncomfortable because it might make somebody else uncomfortable.

I am surely sensitive and often judgmental, I would hate to be an insensitive writer and photographer, that doesn’t really work for me. If people don’t wish to know what I think of their comments, then don’t write to me, isn’t that what some people are saying to me?

I may be sensitive, but not so much that I ever shut up or will give up my right to speak. As to being judgemental, I plead guilty. I don’t see that changing, if I were not judgemental I would not have much to say every day.

And don’t kid yourself. I have been writing online for more than half of my life, and if I were truly sensitive I would probably be dead. A good friend says I have perfected the art of appearing sensitive at times, while I have the hide of a rhinoceros. I fear there is some truth to that, just ask Maria.

What really makes me angry is the hypocrisy behind this faux victimization and absurd double standard.I love to laugh, but I love to tell my truth even more.

If you share your life honestly, them you should not have to expect to be a toilet bowl for people and their own issues. If you reply, you are arrogant or judgmental or too sensitive. Yuk. I will never go for that.

If any of you really find my comments offensive or arrogant, then you might take your own advice, shrug, accept it as the price of being online and reading things on the Internet for free, and move on, just like people are always telling me to do. But most of the time, they don’t do it, they would rather be mad and argue.

Truly, I can take it, but I know too many people who have been silenced because they can’t. This is a never ending struggle. It will never be won, and can never be lost.

I think I hate hypocrisy more than anything in the world, and I think that is perhaps the issue I ultimately have to accept or change.  That’s what makes me the angriest.

Hannah Arendt, the moral philosopher and brilliant writer and one of the great inspirations in my life, shared my view about hypocrisy. I shudder what she might think to say to people who wrote her to say her writing was damaging their health or was no good because it made them uncomfortable.

I am a pussycat in comparison.

She called hypocrisy “the vice of vices.”

“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices,” she wrote, “is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

Amen.