Life is too short to be bullied. Period.

First it was this post >

Is the lawn still king or will city bylaws finally be modernized to protect our right to create a naturalized garden?

< where I received over 5000 (!!!) viewings from a wide range of people interested in this bylaw saga restricting a ‘wild’ garden in Smith’s Falls.

Then I wrote this post >

Why is what I grow in my garden anyone else's business?

< in response to a comment I received on the first…a comment that was inflammatory, bigoted and just plain mean.

Then I wrote this post:

Our flag. Has its meaning changed for you?

Again, and from the same individual, I received a long comment, blasting me for criticizing our armed forces, slamming our flag and basically not being a good Canadian.

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I stewed over this, as one does, because I felt that this person, the same one who had commented on the Sinclair garden post, had taken what I had said out of context and was not willing to hear my argument or to believe that I could even be a good and thoughtful person. Sadly, when I finally decided to ban them, it meant their comment disappeared as well (I hadn’t thought to save it…but trust me, whenever a reader calls you “lady” while they’re lambasting you, it’s not a compliment lol!)

I’ve been writing this blog (December 2020 and onward) and my earlier one for many years now (January 2011 to December 2020) and before that I wrote a bi-weekly gardening column for the Ottawa Citizen newspaper (you remember what newspapers are, right?) and before that, very briefly, for a community paper. Prior to that I had a garden store for ten years. That is all to say that I’ve been a somewhat ‘public’ person for years now and it is rare that someone has sought to lash out, bully or denigrate me. Yes, it happened while I had the store. It happened while I wrote for the Citizen and it has happened online.

Someone I read and listen to (her name is Heather Cox Richardson and she is an American history professor at Boston College who writes and also does a podcast called Now and Then with Joanne Freeman, another American history professor — do read and listen to these as they are not only great history lessons for American history buffs but also speak to what’s happening today south of our border) said recently, and I paraphrase: “You can come to my house but you can’t piss on my rug.” At least you won’t be allowed to stay if you do the latter, so, since this reader pissed on my proverbial rug, I banned her.

I don’t do that lightly. I once had a reader chastise me for criticizing red mulch; I had another become wildly upset when I didn’t give more helpful germination instructions for the Himalayan blue poppy (?!) The latter and I formed a brief but conciliatory email relationship as I sought to make things right. The red mulch lady, not so much.

I’ve only ever banned someone when I acted as an Administrator for a Facebook dog cancer support group, where emotions often ran high and more often than I care to recall, angry people lashed out inappropriately. But it never sat right with me as they were hurting. Until now.

You see, no one has the right to bully you or to characterize you as someone who you are not. My post about the Canadian flag did not make me a bad citizen or an anarchist, or a history denier, or a Canadian armed forces hater. It presented the case for our flag perhaps not being the best representative of who we really are, or at least, who we might want to be now. Not a colony or a colonizer, not a nod to our institutionalized military, not the easy solution presented by a red maple leaf. Yes, it’s a pretty flag, but it also doesn’t fully respect this land’s history and those who came before ‘us’. It’s just a thought, as Beau of the Fifth Column would say.

Be that as it may, I appreciate each and every one of my readers and look forward to more dialogue. Welcome in.

Just don’t be a jerk or I’ll ban you too ;c)