This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In the summer of '64, Kevin Griffin's treehouse was the gathering place for guys my age. You had to be male, willing to cuss and have recently finished the sixth grade, the last grade of elementary school.
Being elementary school "graduates," we considered ourselves almost adults. We congregated in Kevin's treehouse to talk about big kid subjects of mutual interest — girls, explosives, various corporal punishments we had endured, etc.
Kevin was fat, bespectacled and fiendishly devious. Despite his mental lapses, he had planned his treehouse well. It was high enough for privacy, too complicated for little kids to climb, and built strongly enough to withstand anything short of gunfire.
Looking back, I can see that Kevin's treehouse was the early forerunner of today's internet "chat room." Conversation there had few rules and only a vague notion of an administrator. The only monitor was Kevin's mom, who never got involved unless we cussed loud enough for her to hear.
There was just one problem. Kevin's older brother Doug would sometimes climb up to the treehouse to smoke and play his guitar. Doug was large, evil-tempered, and unpredictable. Kevin hated him.
Doug rarely said anything to us. He smoked and pretended he was Elvis. If he offered an observation on the current topic, we did our best to consider it. Kevin couldn't.
Being singularly clueless, Kevin always wanted to challenge Doug by being snide or insulting. One hot afternoon, we were talking about the mystery of girls. Doug said next time he would bring some girlie magazines for us to look at.
Kevin immediately started in on him. Doug was a pervert. Kevin would tell their mother. Doug sucked at guitar playing. He was mid-sentence with the last insult when Doug, without looking up from his guitar, put his foot on Kevin's chest and pushed him out of the treehouse.
It was at least 15 feet to the ground. Kevin did a couple of flips and landed flat on his back. There he lay for a full minute, making noises like someone vacuum suctioning a dead horse. Eventually he crawled off to report the matter.
Untroubled, Doug continued playing his guitar. I was awestruck. It was the most perfect example of what would later become known as "unfriending" that I had ever seen. It stayed with me the rest of my life.
I'm glad it did. The internet isn't a treehouse. It's more akin to an asylum. There's very little privacy, lots of pointless debates, and it's available to anyone, including the mentally disturbed. The internet today hints that civilized behavior for some people is just a thin coat of paint.
People have always chatted. And always disagreed. But early forms of chat rooms — campfires, village wells, saloons — required people to converse face-to-face and therefore consider the repercussion of bad manners. Not anymore.
But you don't really have to put up with the insulting behavior of anonymous people, or even people you know. You can unfriend them on Facebook, block them on email, and just plain stay away from them.
If you don't like what someone else is saying/writing, don't allow them to suck energy out of you by becoming vexed about it. Just kick them out of the treehouse. Or you can jump. It's worth it to get away from some people.
Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.