For what it's worth, a hearty "Here! Here!" From this obolite of 20+ years.
Be nice, to each other and to our moderators, who have volunteered their
very valuable time for us all and have an unenviable task in moments like
these.
Mitch Ratzlaff
On Monday, January 4, 2016, Lars Per Norgren <larspernorgren@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Decades ago Wallace Stegner wrote "The verbal formulation of distress
has the capacity to cure it." I fully understand people's need to comment
on current events. I can see no merit in comments clearly intended to be
hurtful. None of us likes what is happening, so how is being mean to some
of us in any way helping to make it better? I'm an opinionated and willful
soul who has always appreciated the moderators on this list. Obol
subscription is at an all time. i doubt that would be the case if anarchy
prevailed.
On Saturday I participated in the Yaquina Bay CBC. The most
significant event was seeing multiple Snowy Plover on South Beach. The last
time I saw them there was the 1976 CBC. They have been absent for most of
the intervening years. The world is getting better in many ways. Let's not
lose track of that in the heat of the moment. The plover are back to no
small extent thanks to one of our moderators on his day job. In a 1978
interview in The Paris Metro Frank Zappa said,"It's not getting any smarter
out there. You've got to come to terms with stupidity and make it work for
you." This is no time to fight fire with fire. If you can't be smarter than
than the idiots you deplore, at least make an effort to be nicer.
I saw a Peregrine yesterday, probably the same one I saw on the
Corvallis CBC Dec.15. I saw two Peregrines on the Coos CBC. Not all that
newsworthy to the cogniscenti, but when my team thought we saw a Peregrine
on the Corvallis CBC in 1971 no one believed us because the species was so
rare. It really is getting better out there. Peregrine and Snowy Plover
numbers are way up in Oregon. So is female literacy worldwide. LarsPOST:
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