Every Little Thing We Do

I didn't link to another blog from my writing blog today. In fact, I didn't write the post that I'd been planning to write that had been triggered by the other blog. The post was about writers' block, and it was a good one. More to the point for me, it tied directly in with one of the most popular posts I've ever written, Writing is Easy.

Like most of my writing, the post I was going to write began unfurling in my mind, unbidden. But then I gave a moment's thought to the blog I was going to link to. It's primary purpose (self-confessed) is to put people down. Not all people, just those the author considers intellectually inferior.

I think there was a time when I would have thought, "Well, I'm just linking to this one post, and there's nothing wrong with this post." There was a time when I would have thought that someone who wouldn't link to a blog post about writing because it happened to reside on a blog about how stupid people are was going a little far, was being a little too judgmental, perhaps. I would, I expect, have rolled my eyes at the idea. It wouldn't be like endorsing her ideas, right?

Well, in a sense it wouldn't. I could even say that I didn't agree with the rest of the content of the blog or...whatever. Disclaim away: I'm a lawyer, after all. But I'm a lot more conscious these days of the way that every little action has effects we never see. It's easy enough to think, "It's not like I'm getting thousands of visitors a day", and that's true. It's entirely likely that only a handful of people would follow that link on my blog. That one link would only boost that blog's Technorati authority by one, and that one backlink from my blog (which has no page rank) would certainly have no effect on Google ranking.

So what's the harm?

The simple answer is that I don't know, but that I've come to realize that "I don't know" and "there is none" are not identical statements. Maybe just one person clicking that link would think the abuse was clever and slide a little further from compassion. Maybe one person would send the link to someone else, who would love it and post it in a group or forum where a dozen or a hundred others might click it. And, of course, maybe none of those things would happen. But comparing the upside (I felt like writing a blog post that would have tied in) with the downside (any possible appearance of endorsement or accidental boost to a blog that exists to advance a philosophy as inconsistent with Christian principles as any I've ever seen), it seemed pretty clear which way the scales tipped.

I've written before, on another blog, about the way the little decisions we make in everyday life effect the people around us. I guess this is just one more example, one more arena, in which I'm realizing we have to think through the ramifications of things that might not appear, at first glance, to have any.