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He has a dirty and
thankless job – I mean your critic. He spends his days and nights thinking of
new ways to oppose you and your posts. Here he comes:
He comes to the village
square ready to oppose that diatribe that you spew at the slightest
instigation. Naturally, you wish you could strangle him, as he forces you to
respond to his opposition of your posts while you fume with rage.
He sharpens his opposition
as he attacks you for attacking writers and public officials who are dear to
him; and when he is done, you are, in the privacy of your home or office,
fuming with rage and typing furiously in order to respond to his opposition.
You hate to respond to him but you cannot allow him to define you; no he cannot
have the last word.
He roams the threads
looking for that one line, one sentence, or one phrase, out of many paragraphs
that you wrote. When he finds it, he gloats as he drives home the needle into
your enraged cyber back and you wince in pain and curse the hand with which he
types such devilish bullets into your fuming mind. The fuming rage consumes you
as your hand reaches for the keyboard and your mind races for a rejoinder to
his opposition.
To you, your opponent, the
critic, is a scoundrel, only interested in opposition in order to herald
discord into the town square among peaceful villagers. To you, he is a no-good
fire starter, a devil, a misguided cockroach that needs to be swatted out of
cyber space so that decent, decorous, thinkers may reason among themselves
without engaging in criticism just for the sake of opposition. Just looking at
his cyber name on the monitor of your computer triggers flights of anger in you
and the anger pushes the limits of your defensive thinking because you have to
respond to that negative appraisal.
As your rage subsides, you
can hear yourself thinking: ah, if only we all had that gift of intellectual
harmony, that sense of accord and satisfaction, that ideal temperament that
counsels against criticism; you wish those qualities were apportioned equally
to all people at birth; then that scoundrel of an opponent would not be here in
the peaceful square opposing you and making you work overtime responding to his
critical argument.
Sorry oo. Ndo. Felix
feels your pain; Son of the Delta sympathizes with you; Mikky jaga
sees where you are coming from; docokwy, denker, Overload,
and the NVS lawyers and pastors are full of pity for you. Sorry. But this box
in which my thinking, full of pity for you, is encased is too restrictive.
Allow me to think outside the box for a change, just for today. I want to pay
tribute to the critics:
To all of you
misunderstood and unsung heroes, otherwise called critics and opponents, remain
steadfast and consoled. Rest assured that at least one villager sees the
excellent method by which you fire up the neurons in our brains and force us
unsuspecting villagers to reach the peaks of our mental performances. It is
because you oppose, that the opposed is forced to think, under stress, and in
the process develop his or her survival skills.
I salute all of you who criticize, because when you
insert those bullet-like words into the skins of your targets, the unsuspecting
targets are forced to experience a productive form of pain that teaches him or
her lessons in mental endurance. They are lessons that the target might never
otherwise have acquired.
I sing your praises, all of you who have accepted
the mantle of opposition, because, very often it is only one person at a time
that you oppose. Your targeted opposition thus forces the one person opposed,
who is standing alone, responding alone, and fighting alone, away from his or
her cyber kiths and kin, to learn a lesson in independence. It is a survival
skill that you are teaching him or her.
I eulogize you for your tough-love and
steadfastness in your unrequited vocation of love. You are like the strict,
persistent, school teacher who forces the reluctant student to learn. But you
are not paid like the teacher. Forgive us who wished you strangled while we
received the benefits of your free education. We were not thinking outside the
box. Today, my thinking has escaped the restrictions of the box and I can see
you under a new shinning light. Ah, what a bright light it is.
I rise and clap for all of
you who oppose, because you provide variety in the spices of life in the
village. Your targets who wish we all lived in an ideal commune of like-minded,
like-thinking, agreeable kiths and kin would be bored into depression if their
wishes came true. Without your kind, I imagine a world full of predictable and
lifeless lives, gray in colour, numb in thinking, and devoid of challenges. In
hindsight, I now see that when you criticized, your targets often rose and
bounced high and, in the process, ignited sparks that lighted up our world in
colorful rainbow.
I particularly salute you
because, while your target fumes with rage, I see his reasoning processes
flower as he castigates you; I note how his analysis improves each time he
defends himself against your opposition; see how you have flushed him out of
his comfort zone to motivate him to reach beyond his usual limitations; have
you seen that as he tries to teach you a lesson with his newfound thinking
processes, it is really a mutually beneficial process of education for both the
critic and the target because the critic is also a target.
Sure I sing your praises
today, critic. But tomorrow I may wake up and find that my thinking about you
has been forced back into the box. If that happens, will you remember to rouse
me out with a generous dose of criticism? Ah, the wonderful life of a critic!
I salute you.
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Authors 
Posted by Robot| 27.02.2008 02:41