I have resisted posting about this topic because I didn’t want to encourage even more hate on the web, but now that some time has passed and more protections have been set in place, I am prepared to tell you on January 16, 2006 — Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America — something awful happened here.
My post on that day, The Shared Legacy of a Solitary King,
was well-received and I thought it served the spirit of a great man.
A few hours after that post was made public, I received an anonymous
piece of hate mail calling me a “Nigger Lover” for my post concerning
Dr. King and I was told I would be “taken care of” in due time.
If you’ve been on the web any amount of time at all you know hate is
out there everywhere all day every day and you just ignore it and keep
doing the right thing in the ongoing service of beauty and goodness.
Later
that day, however, at 6:35pm Eastern — this site was knocked down, but
not out, with a Dedicated Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. We were
offline for only about five minutes as the server automatically
re-started, but the movement of hate into concerted action was a sad
and unnecessary end to a rather fine day.
Media Temple are my hosting
service and they were able to lock down this site even more with
security measures over the last two weeks that are now tested and in
place — but dedicated people who are intent in tearing you down can
always find a morsel of success to confirm in their own minds their
purpose in acting out is righteous and done without moral malice or
mortal malfeasance.
The purpose in me telling you this now is to thank you for standing
with me here because if this blog didn’t have some sort of sensed
ethereal power we would not have been seen as a threat in need of
attacking.
The Power of the Written Word was reconfirmed for me in this experience
and I will continue to pound pencils into ploughshares with you while
others in the world choose to solider on taking up swords to slay good
intentions into silence elsewhere.
Have you ever had a website or a blog methodically attacked for
something you wrote online?
Have you been email bombed by a group that does not agree with you?
Share your story with us and be sure to tell us how you fought back and
recovered to write again another day!