As it turns out, if you take a second to look around carefully, you may notice that there are people in this spinning ball of lava that we call our world, who are often times unable to participate in mature, adult, and reasonable human confrontation or discourse. Generally, I try to avoid being exposed to, let alone participating, in discussions or confrontations that are purely there for negative reasons.

There are a lot of vocal or “open” people around you, and they are often fully willing to expose you, and anyone willing to listen, to their annoyances, anxieties, issues, drama, and troubles. Unfortunately, when you become a willing (or even unwilling) audience to their often emotionally draining tirades, their mental and emotional “unhappiness” will dip into your own inner “happy and positive bucket”.

Some do not even have to be vocal to dip into your reserve or positivity, they can tap into your vibe and rob you of what normally would be personally cherished happiness. Keep in mind that compassion for your fellow human being is of vital importance, but never should it be  allowed to suck you into their environment of negative confrontation and immature verbal assaults.

And now, with the advent of social networking  ”broadcast” tools such as twitter, facebook, and even the grand daddy of the technology, MySpace, people are constantly dialed-in and broadcasting their inner workings and spewing some seriously negative energy. The Internet has empowered those people to take their behavior to a whole new level of “bucket dipping”.

The constantly “on” nature of laptops, netbooks, and cell phones, coupled with the lack of actual creative output or medium, allows for the kind of insight into the negative ramblings of angry people, while at the same time providing illumination into the thoughts they are simply incapable of expressing in a more productive method, or to a more appropriate method.

As the song says “that’s the problem with angry people, they are never happy alone.” The thing to always remember on the Internet is that there is forever a record of your writings, and that something dashed off in the heat-of-the-moment can sometime come back to hurt later when others do a simple Google search.

In this age of cultural and racial intolerance, and the constant threat of global collapse from a financial and social viewpoint, one would think that we would try just a bit harder to be happy, kind, and tolerant.

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