The Elephant

I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to post this entry. I apologize if you suddenly get ten of them!

Normally I am willing to take a stand on almost anything. I can be decisive and determined and all that. Somehow, this banner ad thing just didn't fire my blood up as much as some. I noticed we get ads on our email, on our entry alerts, and just about every where else. Still, the issue looms on my computer screen like a huge, uninvited elephant, glaring me in the eye and daring me to do something.

I do intend to write some emails to AOL giving my opinion. I do find the ads to be misplaced inside of our journals. While we do not own this space, it *feels* like ours, like it is our private domain and an ad in it is a violation of personal space. It is vaguely like being groped in a crowd, or having someone peek in a window late at night.

Still, this is our community, and I don't want to empower anyone to take that away from us. The community, the friendships, the sharing, those things we developed on our own. Those are ours. No one can put a banner on them. We can't even touch it, it's something deep inside us that is inviolable. For me, that special bond we have transcends banner ads, especially since we can block them.

As an atheist, I will fight for your right to practice your chosen religion. I will also fight for your choice to try to eliminate the banner ads from our journals. I don't know if we can be successful, but I can say it makes me very sad to see people scattering to the winds to other blogs. The sense of community is shedding, and that is so sad.

Just where is this new spellcheck button? I don't seem to have one. Surely, as usual, I made up at least one word. (-and it's not 'inviolable' - which I looked up, since I wasn't sure it was a word but it sounded right to me, and it said no such word. So I looked in the Thesaurusunder untouchable, and found pretty much nothing. So I looked again under something else, maybe sacred, and found inviolable. Odd dictionary system eh?)

 

~~Finally with the help of a few friends I was able to get my journal working again! Probably I will have to go back into this entry and fix the paragraphs, since I had it pasted in Word.