A while back I wrote a post about smelling cigarette smoke on somebody waiting for chemo. It made me wonder how I "should" feel about somebody who engages knowingly in risky behavior and then suffers from consequences that were very possible to likely. I posted links to that blog post on LinkedIn and Twitter, generating much more traffic than most of my posts do. Boy, did I touch a nerve with that one!
For the record:
I do not think anyone deserves cancer, lung or otherwise.
I do know that many people who are not smokers and who never were smokers are diagnosed with lung cancer each and every day.
I do feel empathy and sympathy for anyone dealing with cancer - those with the disease, their family members, and others helping them cope with it.
Still, based on some of the reactions to that post, you would think I'd said "anyone with lung cancer deserves to suffer" and "don't spend any money on lung cancer research because only smokers get lung cancer."
My point today isn't to argue the merits of my post or of the responses I received to it. It is to acknowledge that in the middle of the fight, our perception is often and understandably skewed. Like the angry driver just looking for somebody to cut him off so he can lay on the horn, or worse, we read something on a website with clenched teeth and fingers ready to pounce in reply. I get that. You've been through hell. Or hell, maybe you're still in hell, and along comes somebody you don't know who thinks he can say something provocative just to generate traffic on his website or to somehow drive sales of his stupid little book. So you lay into him.
And realizing he's wandered into a bees nest, he slowly backs out, removing the external links to his post so that only those who find his blog more directly will ever run into that offensive post again.
To those offended by my words, I'm sorry. I hope the fight you are a part of is a successful one.
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