blogging etiquette fail

have you ever been offended by what someone else wrote in their personal blog?  i'm not talking about liberal v. republican arguments, or snide remarks about perhaps liking bad music.  i'm talking about being seriously offended, like being called a piece of trash offended.  how did you handle it?  did you respond to the post?  did you ignore it?  should we, as voluntary blog readers, even waste our energy being offended by another's post?  i mean, isn't everyone entitled to their own opinion (even if their opinion makes them sound like a tool)? isn't that the whole point of blogging?  to be able to express your opinions openly and publicly?

but if that is the whole point -- that you can express close-minded, possibly racist and definitely classist opinions to God and country through your blog -- then doesn't the act of blogging necessarily welcome otherwise unsolicited responses?  should we, as bloggers, allow commentary from those we offend?  or should we, as blog readers, just click the "back" button on our web browsers and try to forget that this ignorant jerk (and their blog) even exist?  does your response change when dealing with a personal blog v. a more editorial/business oriented blog?

this all came about the other night while i was browsing through twenty-something bloggers, searching for bloggers in hawaii.  during my search, i came across a nearly-defunct blog written by a girl who isn't from hawaii, but lived there with her boyfriend back in 2008.  it was an interesting blog to begin with (i.e. very personal, to the point where i almost felt like i shouldn't be reading anymore because i didn't actually know this girl, and i'm not sure she'd want perfect strangers reading these things about her), so i hit the tag for "hawaii" to see if she mentioned anything about the islands in any of her posts.

oh, did she ever.

now, there have been several other times in my life when i've read something (usually about hawaii and/or hawaiians, and sometimes published as fact) that i felt was uninformed and insulting, and i've chosen to respond to those authors accordingly.  but i just couldn't do it this time.  i was so mad.  i'm generally not a very confrontational person, but i know that if i had commented on her post it most definitely would have been confrontational, just as insulting, and probably as close-minded about her as she is about hawaii (and, by default, me).

but i'm still left wondering 1) if i have any sort of "right" to be upset about a post some girl wrote on her blog more than a year ago which i read voluntarily, 2) if it's okay to write a response to her post on my blog that i don't really ever anticipate her reading, and 3) if this is just my induction into the the nature of blogging itself, much of which is made up of anonymous and passive-aggressive encounters.  i would love to know if any of you have had similar experiences, or just have insights into proper blogging etiquette.

also, because i didn't write a comment to her post, and i still had so much to say about it, i'm including it here.  if interested, you'll find a link to her original post as well as my initial uncensored and unsolicited response after the jump.

my unsent response to this open letter to the people of oahu:

i mean, it's one thing to be upset about something that may have happened (like having a car nearly run into hers) caused by a specific person at a specific time, and i can get behind a ranting post just as much as the next person.  but it's a completely separate thing to start an angry tirade against an entire island which not only mocks the locals that live there, but also shows a complete lack of understanding and compassion for a community she obviously knows nothing about.

because you know what?  yeah, people living with their entire extended families may not be okay with you, and it may show a lack of ambition in your opinion, but for a lot of the low income families in hawaii (i.e. local families, aka families like mine), that just so happens to be the only option we've got.  and it's also a cultural thing, which you would know if you ever considered learning a thing or two about the history of the place you're living in.

and you know what else?  i'm sorry, but it's pretty damn hard for people to keep their apartments (better known as the projects) looking like the sunshine-and-roses 'burbs you may have grown up in when they've got kids to feed, two full time minimum wage jobs to work that barely cover the rent and groceries, and the area they were lucky enough to find affordable housing in is already overridden by crime caused by unemployment, drug addiction, and skyrocketing cost of living rates which aren't helped by all the wealthy folk moving to hawaii, buying up property in the nice areas, and raising all the property taxes without giving a thought to the effect that's having on a people that have been there for hundreds of years and that have been made second-class citizens in their own homeland by ignorance like this.

oh, and p.s. regardless of the fact that i have family in the army and airforce, even i can't deny that the military is blamed for ruining a lot of hawaii because they illegally overthrew our government, they ruined one of the most beautiful bays we have and turned it into the disaster that is now pearl harbor, and they used an entire island for target practice.  and they continue to use whole mountain ranges for the same thing, meaning their big ass trucks get a free pass to trample all over indigenous plants and wildlife, tearing up land that -- in a place like hawaii -- was probably sacred once but is now littered with shells and unexploded munitions among other things.   look it up, there's about ten years worth of government reports and court cases on the topic of military pollution in hawaii. 

and first you want to say that if the military weren't in hawaii it should just be turned into a landfill for all the trash, and then say that locals can stay because we'd fit in so nicely?!

go home.