the gift that keeps on poisoning

I came across this short animation today (thanks gheemaker) and it was a perfect reflection of what I had been feeling in the past few days. Like I said in my first post, I’m so curious about how others think and feel and this whole blog experience has really given me access to so many people's private thoughts and views that I would never have otherwise been exposed to.
That’s been the positive aspect.
On the flipside, however, a lot of what I’ve been reading (too much!) has been overflowing with negativity.
Venting, whining, ranting, denigrating, condemning gadols, belittling institutions, insulting commentators, slandering communities, criticizing lifestyle and life choices seems to be everywhere.
I realize that many people feel stifled, and haven’t found the ability to express themselves in the real world. The Internet, and blogging in particular seems to have a special appeal to people who don’t feel comfortable expressing these ideas in person. But I wonder, who says that ALL of these thoughts and feelings need to be expressed at all, and if they do, why in such a negative way. Aren’t there more constructive ways of dealing with pent up frustration, annoyance, resentment and discontentment?
I realize that if all this negativity affects me this strongly, the solution is to avoid reading it. And I am trying. Just like I work on eliminating people from my life who have a negative influence on me, people who drag me down and pollute my mind with cynicism and pessimism, I should be just as vigilant with what I read, and for this I blame myself and no one else. But aside from the fact that I don’t think its good for me to read this, I wonder how many realize how harmful this is to themselves, as the authors and to their communities, as their audience.
The reason this short movie reminded me of what I was feeling is that I found myself getting so disgusted and disturbed by some of the things I had read that I could feel it weighing down my soul, poisoning me from the inside. Just like with poison, in order to relieve myself of the stinging, I found myself extracting it from myself by passing it on to someone else. Once I told my friend the disturbing gossip/criticism/complaints/information I had come across, I felt better, but she now undoubtedly inherited the poison. I assume she went home tonight and told her husband, in her own attempt of ridding herself of this poison. Tomorrow morning he will repeat this disgusting and disturbing information to his co-worker, who will then go home and repeat it to his wife.
The negativity just keeps spreading.
As it spreads, we carry this weight that drags us down. We get anxious. We get frustrated. We feel alone, abandoned. We lash out. We create anxiety in others. They lash out.. and soon enough we are living in the miserable, hateful, selfish, aggressive society we had been venting and ranting about to begin with.
People always say its cathartic to voice our frustrations, there’s no harm in venting, it’s good to speak your mind. But I question how true that is. I am NOT suggesting sweeping issues under the rug or ignoring them or avoiding dealing with them. I’m not advocating holding things in and letting them contaminate us from the inside, but aren’t there more constructive, more healthy ways of dealing with situations we find unpleasant or even wrong? Why not speak to the appropriate people, why not take active steps in starting changes in our communities, why not look for the source of these problems and find ways to address them in a productive, growth oriented way, why not try and look at the problems from a different perspective. At the very least why not work on our own behaviour and watch how our positive deeds and conduct affect those around us.

This short film, Cri addresses the issues of verbal aggression and violence in and caused by the urban environment we live in. When I saw it, it reminded me of something slightly different. It reminded me of the way we keep criticizing and badmouthing our communities, leaders and lifestyles, the way we end up internalizing other people’s negativity and how we end up spewing it back into our communities, thereby creating the poisoned society we were aiming to escape.