Spitter Rage and Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch was undeservedly spat upon in Munich.  After tossing a loogie Arrington’s way, the Raging Spitter fittingly disappeared into the crowd.

In an uncommonly personal post from Europe, Arrington reported Wednesday that he is going to take some time off and reconsider his future. The decision, he said, was prompted by an encounter he had as he was leaving a tech conference Tuesday in Munich, Germany.

“Someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face,” he wrote. “Before I even understood what was happening, he veered off into the crowd.”

The incident, as Arrington portrays it, represented a culmination of harassment that has come with TechCrunch’s success in its business niche. Last summer, Arrington said, he and his family even had to deal with death threats from “an off-balance individual.” He added: “Seeing my parents fear for their lives and not understand how or why their son was in this position changed me, made me a much less forgiving person in general.”

Of the more recent incident, Arrington declared: “I draw the line at being spat on. It’s one step away from something far more violent.”

While I certainly don’t condone the spit on Arrington’s face, I unfortunately understand the action even as it disgusts me. 

The new wave of behavior on the internet — and in real life — is moving downward from the vile and putrid hate comment and into the gutter of threatened, and then realized, physicality; and it won’t stop until someone famous, like Michael Arrington, is killed and the rest of us finally step forward and spittle-shout “ENOUGH!” back into the nasty, nameless, faces of those that live to condemn minds unlike theirs.

Spitter Rage is the realization of a life lost, an opportunity draining away and the measure of a man that cannot compare with success in the real world.

It is tough to build something from nothing while tearing down goodness and beauty can be done in an instant:  Everyone can destroy; only the few can build.

Arrington is threatening retirement — but that won’t be enough — these Spitters want a total recantation of his success and a bowing down to their inherent, misunderstood, superiority. 

There is no place for Arrington to hide. 

The only choice for Michael Arrington is to fight back, to be vigilant in the eye of evil, and to refuse to give in to terroristic threats and an ongoing crybabyism that those that wish him harm were unable to build an empire of their own out of the ether.

The day of reckoning for the spitters is every single moment as they face the harsh realization that the accomplishments of their lives are nothing but sawdust and sealing wax — and no amount of spit or split blood will ever change that fact.