Dance craze, aerobic exercise, or stunted intellectual growth? You decide.

Sep 22, 2001

I ran a directory of self-help groups and organisations in the US, Canada, and the UK. There was also a section for online resources, such as group resource sites, rings, chat rooms, what have you. This site was strictly for ongoing personal support and recovery from things like alcoholism, physical abuse, sexual abuse, mental difficulties, and so on. I didn’t have heavy listings of, for example, cancer survival groups, because there was already a strong cancer support network in place in 1996, when I started the sites. Things like rape, gambling addiction, epilepsy, and learning disorders still carry a social stigma, and people suffering with these things may not always know that there are other sufferers who are there to support them, and be supported. No disaster relief sites, no tornado recovery, no earthquake assistance — those tend to be temporary sites, having a life of about four months maximum; and those also have well-known government bureaus that take an active hand in helping the victims and survivors. (When was the last time an anorexic or overweight woman had a government agent come to her home talk with her about not being pressured by society to conform to a certain body image, endangering her health in the process? If this ever happens, I will be quite pleasantly surprised to see that humans have gotten so good at taking care of ourselves and one another that governments have time to spend doing things like this, instead of putting in place and maintaining schools, police, and emergency care systems, along with the bajillion other things that they do.)

At any rate, on the 12th of September, I received a request to include a site for supporting the survivors of the terrorist attacks in New York. I deleted the site, saying that it was unsuitable content for my directory, which had a narrower focus; and advising the webmaster to get his site listed with DMOZ — they welcomed such listings, and from there, his site would be listed with Google, AOL, Yahoo, and hundreds of other search engines all over the globe. (I was also wary of letting any sites in that might be put together by spammers looking to capitalise on the terror in the eastern US, but didn’t say that — figured that either he’d understand my reasoning, or not, with my other remarks.) I received an email back in reply. Here’s the entire text:

unsuitable content
way to go
you must support Bin Laden!

Now, the events had everyone unsettled: everyone, no matter what country they called home, was shaken by what had happened just two days before. But this response was, supposedly, from someone with enough neurons rubbing together to put together a fairly nice site, appearance-wise, and then start submitting it to search engines, even off-the-beaten-path directories like the IYP. Yet his common sense flew right out the window. Can you all say ‘kneejerk jingo’? I know you can. I should be nicer. He may have lost someone, or several someones, in the disaster. I truly don’t know where this person was located. I also don’t have the email any more — it was irritating me so much that I deleted it. Other than knowing it was an AOL address (which doesn’t say much these days, even though us longtime Internet users would dearly love to maintain our snobbery), there weren’t any details or clues that I remember about this person’s location. I didn’t check the header, either. On a less serious note, I wonder if that will become a new exercise… KNEEJERK JINGO! Keep fit - keep trim - keep in shape to bomb and hate! Your heart rate will stay nice and low! Your hollow patriotism will go nice and high! It also sounds like a new dance step, or some kind of spicy Caribbean food — you know, from the little island next to Jamaica: “We got Jamaican Jerk Chicken, and American Kneejerk Jingo!”

Keywords: | terrorism | prejudice | nationalism |
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