Hmmm. Saw this thread...and then had to do a whole LOT of reading to get to the end of it.

Well, well. It is very good to see you making an appearance here, Max, because many had been wondering when you would. I certainly had been.

An idea: why not charge a nominal yearly fee for membership? This place has a very large number of members, does it not? You could figure out the yearly cost of running it, divide that by the average number of members, and come up with a reasonable estimate for what that fee could be. I don't imagine it would be all that large, and I don't see why most people wouldn't be willing to pay it.

I don't know if that would be workable, but it might.

Anyway, the place had been feeling more and more like a ship with no rudder lurching around in a storm and a lot of people getting seasick, and the crew fighting amongst themselves, and no sign of the captain anywhere...so I'm glad you chose to launch this thread.

And with that...I have to pause and take a breather, maybe get back to it tomorrow...because I frankly don't have anything else to say about it just at the moment. I've been feeling a bit shellshocked lately, for a number of reasons that have little to do with this forum. I come here mostly just to ease tension, but often as not end up acquiring more tension than I was suffering before I logged on. Sort of a catch-22.

No, wait.... One more thing I will say. Words can and do hurt many people, and probably most people very badly at one time or another. Words can hurt people for life. That doesn't mean those people couldn't stand to learn more about building up their self-esteem and becoming less vulnerable to words....but IF a person is intelligent enough to realize how their words can hurt people, then why would they choose to go ahead and be verbally savage to people anyway, specially to those who are clearly vulnerable in some way? Isn't that some kind of moral blindness? I don't get how a person can justify it to himself, just because other people aren't apparently as tough as he is.

One has some moral responsibility to imagine what it's like to be in the other person's shoes, as someone said up there. At least I would think so. This is what we try to teach our children, after all. We try to teach them not to wantonly hurt people.

Well...I know I can't do anything about it though...others will do whatever they wish, and I can't change that. I do not doubt that a large number of people have literally become afraid to post here, afraid to reveal anything further about themselves, because they expect to be attacked by someone for it. That's not such a good situation.

A home or a club should not be a place where people are afraid to enter for fear of being abused by someone.