27 Feb 2008 |
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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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