Electronic pillorying in Maine

Meanness is the milfoil of the human heart. Once the habit of meanness is established, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. Now that our Internet-connected world has the ability to broadcast not only every moment of pain but also the instant analysis of bystanders, the mean – who were once limited to sharing their comments at the bar or in the church parking lot after services – can direct their venom more effectively and more publicly at their principal targets. I can’t see the good in this endless cycle of gratuitous judgment.

Three recent tragedies in Maine – the murder of a young boy by his mother’s boyfriend, the deaths of a man and his son from carbon monoxide, and a winter car accident – left nine people dead. They also set the electronic pillory ablaze, filling the Web sites of Maine’s newspapers with predictable outrage.

Indisputably, that child’s murder was a terrible sorrow. Anytime a young person is buried, their hopes and dreams are buried with them. In the end, all judgment has to come down to that poor kid. But whose place is it to make that judgment? Certainly not mine.

I don’t know whether his mother was right or wrong. What I do know is that he died trying to protect her. How would he feel if he could hear the nasty comments directed toward a woman who must surely be mourning him? I don’t assume that I would be more courageous than she was. None of us knows until we’re tested how brave we’ll be.

Other comments criticized the family of the boyfriend and the use of mental illness as a defense. Unless we’re psychiatrists or neurologists, we’re not competent to pass judgment on who’s legitimately mentally ill or who has a brain injury that might diminish culpability; even doctors don’t have full knowledge of the brain’s mysteries.

Besides, who knows what the man’s family should or shouldn’t have done? Isn’t working out those kinds of issues how lawyers earn their money? We could and should leave such judgments to the courts. The purpose of lawsuits is to assign blame objectively.

Nevertheless, it’s easy to understand the need to rage over a child’s murder. The vituperation directed toward the man whose son died with him of carbon monoxide poisoning is harder to comprehend. Did the posters who were quick to criticize the unpaid utility bill intend to suggest that a child should die because his parents didn’t pay the bills? Maybe we’ve become so sure that every individual should be able to be free of any human frailty that we do think the death penalty is appropriate for an unpaid bill. Personally, I think small claims court is a reasonable alternative – and I bet officials at the power company think so, too.

Similarly, writing that the young man who apparently caused the car accident was wrong doesn’t give much credit to his family. If your son was driving with a suspended license and had a fatal car crash, you already know he wasn’t supposed to do that, you probably wish he hadn’t, and lecturing you isn’t necessary, let alone appropriate.

Always lacking in the comments on quotidian tragedies is any sense of “There but for the grace of God go you or I.” We now believe that the doctrine of personal responsibility means that we can never forgive or express compassion or concern for anyone in the wrong. I don’t mind that the parents of a murderer want him to be cared for appropriately or that the family of a sinful driver should mourn him. I don’t even have kids, but I absolutely believe to the bottom of my heart that you’re entitled to love your kid even when he’s completely wrong and that other people have no right to criticize you for being there for him. It’s meanness of the finest order to condemn a parent’s love.

I wouldn’t advocate limiting political commentary, however vicious and inane (if you’ve read two political postings, one calling someone a no-good liberal and the other a no-good wingnut, you’ve read them all), but I don’t think it would be detrimental to free speech for newspaper Web sites to eliminate the opportunity to post your opinion on the suffering of others. If people feel the need to offer their 2 cents, let them go to the wake or the funeral and tell a grieving mother that her kid was no damned good and deserved to die. Let them go sit in the courthouse and show their ignorance by spitting on some family grieving for their son’s thrown-away life – and the people he hurt. If you’re going to be mean, you can at least be as brave as you expect everyone else to be.

Marcella Spruce, originally from Old Town, now lives in New York City.