As I prepare the early drafts of my little book on four decades of life and experiences in Central America, I realised this week that there's going to have to be a stand-alone chapter on some of the strange, often counter-intuitive notions one often comes across around here.
Even supposedly erudite, educated people occasionally give voice to them.
The most recent example — we can dub it The Snowball Effect — is the conviction that when someone is recorded doing something overtly anti-social or otherwise reprehensible in public — be it racist, homophobic or gender abuse or perhaps even cruelty to innocents or animals — it is the person who does the recording and makes it available to the media, old or new, who is thereafter morally responsible for any viral re-transmission of the content, plus all of the consequences thereof, and not in fact the subject of the media or report.
The good citizen is thus a bad citizen, a snowball-pusher worthy of censure, loss of reputation, employment opportunities and so on, regardless how deplorable the originating words or actions of the person who had stepped out of line in the open air.
There are plenty of other examples of such arrevesado thinking, but these will probably have to await publication, to see if they in turn might be bolas of the aforementioned sort.
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