What is the deal . . .

Craziness I tell you! So many of my bloggy-friends are having to shut down their blogs lately due to some crazy circumstances and it makes me ill. I have spoken to 4 bloggers this week who have had to shut down their blogs. One was the target of some online group who targeted the author and reported their family to Child Protective Services. Crazy! The others are all facing their own issues which also could concern CPS. Even Snarky Mom from Postcards from Insanity came back from an absence letting us know that she was the target of a possible law suit due to her blogging. The whole thing makes me ill frankly.

What shocks me is that regardless of what is written in a blog, our readers have only a minute portion of the whole story. It is also easy to say that how I write something could definitely seem very straightforward to me, but a reader could take it completely differently than what I intended. It reminds me of an issue I have had on facebook. I have one friend from high school who is very good at making me think my positions through (typically political ones) and will say something that she thinks I meant a certain way and I had no idea it could've been construed that way from how I wrote it. It always reminds me that everyone's minds work differently all our history and personal experience influence what we read and how we perceive it. I love our discussions, because it always make me think about how I say things and it makes me reclarify my positions so that I am being clear. Most often than not, we find we have similar positions even though at first glance it seems we are miles apart. That is what civil discourse should be like . . . civil.

This is why it amazes me that we can take one blog post (or several to be fair) and make a determination about what may be going on in a home. I know that I have been guilty of this and can see how foolish that truly is. But, to go as far as to turn someone into CPS is ridiculous.

In my own case as well as others of you with kiddos like mine, situations at school, words our child uses, the noises they make when raging, or the confused thinking they use have been reasons for us to have CPS brought into our lives due to mandated reporters. There have been those cases that after the fact, or the CPS involvement that someone within the system has found our blog and misconstrued things that have been said or spoken about. Sad.

In my own case, I had involvement from the housing code people due to a lock that was installed on my door (at the direction of the police) to help keep Dustin safe from running out of our home. It felt like an invasion of privacy even though I put it all out there for anyone to see. It is an odd situation.

For me, I will keep blogging until it bites me in the butt. I sure hope that it doesn't, but odds are . . .