Some of you may have heard about Eric Altermann's altercation with the law (sorry, had to say that!). This is what caught my attention:
A guy came over and asked me who I was and I told him I was a colmunist for The Nation and he told me I had to leave. I thought he was kind of rude, so I asked him his name, thinking it might go into Altercation the next day....
One of the realities of life is having to deal with "officials," whether it be faceless bureaucrats, customer "service" representatives, or the police. In many situations there is a major power imbalance between said officials and those they are to serve and protect. I haven't had many dealings with the police in my life, but I am paranoid enough to always been cautious about them because they do have the power of life and death over you (yes, I know the risk of getting "wronged" by the cops is low, but who cares what the probability is once it happens to you!). This is where having a blog is something I've considered as being handy. My traffic numbers aren't that high. Typically I get 500-1000 unique users on this weblog, and sitemeter tells me my other weblog has 4,000 uniques per day (but a lot of these are google image queries). Nevertheless, that's an non-trivial amount of traffic, and, Google News regular crawls this website. If I was wronged by office Joe Blow, hell yeah I'd get his name, and I would report exactly what happened on my weblog so that when people typed Joe Blow's name into google the story would come up. The point is that Authority shouldn't be faceless or nameless. Remember what happened to Shelley? And remember what happened to the low level editor at Wiley? Now, the threats and abuse she received are not defensible, but frankly who was she to send out a threatening email to a small blogger? It was the power of a corporation she was wielding, she wasn't entering into a human-to-human interaction. Now I assume the editor is far more cautious about assuming that she can throw her weight around just because she works at a large corporation.
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It is very important to get the names of officials you are dealing with, whether in a friendly encounter (so you can commend them) or in a hostile one.
Remember what happened to my daughter? Even in that scary kerfuffle, she got the badge number (hence his name) of her assailant. My daughter doesn't have a blog. But her mother does! :-) Although I didn't put the name out, the story which got linked by some other bigger blogs, it comes up in a google search for the Los Angeles May Day melee.
How do you suggest dealing with people wielding the power of corporations or the government?
How do you suggest dealing with people wielding the power of corporations or the government?
if you have a blog, tell your story and put their names out there. reputation matters.