In many respects, I sincerely regret that I shared my little story regarding the death of my dearest friends 18 year old son in the Bali Bomb thread. With hindsight, it was almost a manipulative trick on my part to somehow, just somehow, tug at the heart of december underneath the impenetrable veneer.
When I wrote my first post in that thread, I was clearly very fired up - I was fuming with righteous indignation that such a painful tragedy could have been exploited by december for the purposes of his SDMB posting style. I felt offended on behalf of all the poor people who no longer have a voice.
But with hindsight, I know that to post on a messageboard at such times probably isn’t the wisest course - it leaves one’self open to all sorts of accusations of hysteria etc.
And yet, ironically - I succeeded. december actually apologised for overstepping the mark and demonstrated that he does, indeed, have a good heart - a very good heart. Then he did an odd thing… instead of running with the contrition, he noted that a fellow Australian Doper later pointed out that there WERE one or two extremely insignificant protests in late 2001 about Australia’s decision to aid the USA in the Afghanistan campaign to throw out the Taliban. december chose to use this extremely tenuous and dubious fact to somehow “justify” the validity of his original OP in the Bali Bombing thread. That was a silly move. And not entirely noble either. He was given hell for it by mhendo, but for mine, I think that tends to exemplify december’s style - he likes to search for really dubious nuggets of history which can then be amplified beyond all truthful significance to validate his core beliefs - and well, that’s a pretty dodgy way of going about things for mine.
Nonetheless, in the heat of the moment, I told december in that Bali thread that his OP had crossed the line and I hoped he would pay for it. With hindsight, I regret that I allowed myself to get so emotional, and secondly, I’m rather sad that it would appear that he DID indeed pay for it too.
december - perhaps, if you are allowed back? Learn to trust some of us, my friend. Some of us, probably most of us, are very decent good people with our hearts in the right place. Learn to trust our observations, and learn from those observations therein.
For now, go in peace, and travel safely.
