Logging Off

Work starts picking up. You attend multiple meetings where people fret about that amorphous, essential thing: shareholder value. Your manager puts you on a high-priority project and you end up in the office at 9 PM, several times a week, staring resentfully at your email for a deliverable that never appears.

When you get home, you reheat yesterday’s takeout and log on to the forum. You answer one new member’s question and gently guide another to an FAQ thread. Then you idle around, clicking in and out of threads.

Daniella has posted another one of her long writeups. She’s texted you about this information already: a discussion about native plants and animals along the coast, the reshaping of the land over the past 200 years, a lament about a particular endangered fish. She signs off with her usual cynicism: Anyways, when we’re all underwater, maybe their population levels will go back to normal again. She’s clearly finished reading the book she told you about, while you’ve been stuck on chapter 3 for weeks.

You scroll down to see the replies to her post. Someone has gone through and quoted a few sentences of her post — where words like displacement, dispossession, genocide appear — and added a single line underneath:

cypress_31 None of this is about foraging. I don’t really understand why you’re bringing this up for a hobby that’s meant to be fun and relaxing.

The next comment is from Daniella:

seed_historian What counts as off topic to you? People post all the time about industrial pollution and underfunded national parks. But mentioning Indigenous displacement is too much???

She’s angry, obviously. The discussion spills over onto a second page, and then a third, when a moderator weighs in:

taiga Moderator OK, this is way too much. Let’s keep this a friendly space for discussions of foraging and not start a political debate. The personal attacks are not appropriate and both of you need to stop.

There is an ambient, tense frustration in your shoulders hunch forward. Yes, there are two people fighting each other. Yes, it is not a friendly conversation anymore. It would probably be easier on taiga, on all the moderators, if this discussion ended.

Something still feels unfair, monstrously and willfully unfair. You are not sure if you can articulate what is so frustrating about this, but your brain starts composing sentences, trying to pull together something diplomatic — something that will only make it worse — something that argues What’s the point of being friendly if we can’t discuss something real?

But your brain is emptied out. If you post something, will it help the situation? Or only make it worse?

• Post to support your friend ›
• Try not to get sucked into an argument ›