I’ve noticed lately there are a lot of heated discussions in the forums, which is both good and bad. Good that we have the participation of the users willing to share their feelings and opinions on the topics. But I’ve also noticed some personal attacks towards certain individuals in the forums that I thought wasn’t really necessary. But that’s just my opinion and I’m sure others will chime in with their own thoughts. As long as there will be democratic forums around the internet, we will continue to have these same misunderstandings. The part I want to address is when the attacks start to get personal and mean. I’m not sure if there are any ground rules for posting threads on here, and if there aren’t any set yet, maybe some should be set. Kind of a code of conduct rules, you know like no slander, no name calling, no unverifiable accusations and stuff like that. I’m sure others will come up with more “rules†that could be added. Basically it’s to keep the forums in a civil and orderly manner. Paddling is supposed to have so much aloha taught to us but we don’t always see it practiced here.
I think one of the problems were that people were jumping to conclusions about a certain topic without knowing all the facts and sometimes that creates an avalanche effect where it’ll start picking up comments and accusations from others along the way. Kind of a mob mentality so to speak. It’s not necessarily anybodies fault for that because when emotions get involved, it can be a very touchy situation, as in the case of Keanu and Ian with the canoes. By the way, I’m glad that situation has been cleared up thanks to both Keanu and Ian. Good job guys.
There was also the thread where Rick Leton was being accused of favoritism on his site which I personally didn’t see, and people were really upset about that situation. But I think in both these cases, if the people who had the problems had originally gone to and discussed their problems in private first, a lot of the online postings wouldn’t have ended up as negative as they did. I think for the most part, we’re all here to help and learn as much as we can about our great sport and culture of hoe wa’a. I mentioned before that the paddling fraternity is a tight knit one where we all help each other. In the spirit of competition that can be over looked sometimes but for the most part I think it still permeates through most all the clubs and paddlers. Here are a couple words that we should keep in mind.
Ha’a ha’a (humbleness, modest, unpretentious), Lokahi (Unity).
Train hard, Paddle hard and Live Aloha
