Point Taken

I've been keeping this blog for years now.  To be exact, my first post was in February of 2007.  I began it to chronicle our life overseas, and that first post explained our choice to move to China.  I used it as a journal, to keep a record of our life but also to vent my frustrations and my explorations of this new and sometimes crazy place.

While in Venezuela, my writing was censored twice.  The censoring was both angering (free speech!) and exciting (how dramatic!).  I began to understand that people reading my blog could interpret my words as representative of American diplomats and possibly the US government.  But I had a rather academic and cynical attitude toward my need to post responsibly.

So, here's where we were lucky.

The latest couple to join our little club of expelled diplomats are leaving India amidst much press.  Their Facebook accounts were hacked into, and plenty of people are finding insult in the casual things these diplomats wrote online to their friends.  A rather angry someone put together a tumblr page called Racist American Diplomats where he highlights things this man and woman said on Facebook, and explains how offensive they are.

I don't know these people, but I can easily identify with the urge to write my thoughts and feelings in a friendly forum.  By definition, a foreign country will feel strange and unfamiliar - and it is typical to both love the place you live and also find it frickin' crazy.  But their writing is being used to portray American foreign policy as racist and to vilify these two individuals.

“To be sure, most of the exchanges are frivolous and typical of social media tattle. But given the sensitive positions they occupied in the US embassy, they are, particularly in hindsight, astonishingly offensive,” the Times of India said.

Point taken.  Nothing on the internet is private, and neither a blog nor Facebook are exclusively personal.  And, probably, just don't say things that could hurt someone else's feelings.