When you read articles online, do you have a tendency to zip through so you can get to the comments section at the bottom?

Okay, I confess… I do.

And I don’t know why. I always come away feeling as if I need to reshower for the day. It seems a good many of the commenters go out of their way to be snarky or downright nasty. You have your few positive-thinking souls, and those who lead with logical arguments, but it seems the majority want to create a new national sport of lambasting anything and everything within their sphere.

I’m glad these lambasters aren’t judge, jury and executioner, or we’d suddenly have a population deficit.

It seems there are a lot of frustrated wannabe critics in the world. They aspire to influence huge swaths of humanity… and the only way they can think to do it is to thrash and trash something. One of my other favorite places to read scathing comments are those reviews you find for restaurants. You may have just wanted to look up how late some local establishment is going to be open, but then you see a couple of highlighted stars and a number of reviews and you think… what is it I don’t know about this place that maybe I should know?

What you read is enough to keep you inside living on rice and eschewing all human contact.

I don’t care if some of these folks are reviewing their local dollar burger joint… I can almost visualize them, their noses stuck in the air so high it’s a marvel they can see their computer screens to type. They are just sooo deadly serious and foo-foo in their reviews. I often have to double-check the website I’m on: did I click on a back issue of Bon Appetit or a come-one/come-all review site?

“The ketcup packets had a slightly squished consistency that suggested the high fructose corn syrup was heated just below the range of sugar before carmelizing into a smear of red paste…”

Welcome to the Lambasting League of Life Haters. By the tone of this post, I think I may have inadvertently joined the ranks!