When I was a kid, suburban neighborhoods like the one we lived in still had a bit of that "Leave it to Beaver" feel.  Kids played in yards and ran in packs.  They organized baseball games and had special names for the various places to meet up.  There was a big pile of boulders left behind in an empty lot when the house-building boom abruptly came to an end because IBM decided to leave town. If you told someone to meet you at "the rocks," he knew to go to this pile of boulders.  "The woods" sloped behind "the rocks" and "the trees" lined the other empty lot across the street. These were our haunts.

And kids fell into standard roles in the social structure.  We had bullies and delinquents and athletes and geeks and girly-girls and tomboys.  When I was just a toddler, I started following my older brothers around the neighborhood and the big kids quickly learned that I was good for a laugh, because I was the kid with the short fuse. I could throw a full-bore tantrum at the slightest provocation and had no problem doing it in front of "God and everyone," as my mother would say.  The older kids took great pleasure in setting me off and standing back to watch.

Then I got a little older. And Garth moved into the neighborhood. Unlike me (and for reasons too depressing to discuss) Garth had every reason to be massively enraged. He was absolutely boiling. It didn't take the pack long to learn that for the human form of bear-baiting Garth was in a class by himself.  So he was taunted and baited on a regular basis and he never failed to deliver.  I recall chasing Garth through the neighborhood threatening him with bottle-rockets and firing them over his head. He didn't have the capacity to fight back, so he usually expressed his rage with showy display.  He grabbed fists full of grass and flung it lamely at us.  He tore his own shirt off and ripped it to shreds.  Occasionally, he bit his own arm, much to the delight of those who sought to rile him.  Score!  Once he was tricked into climbing on to the roof of his own house and the ladder was promptly removed.  He howled and threw his shoes at us. The roof was his stage and we hooted with the pleasure of pushing him on to it. Double score! Then we hid and my mom came home and found him whimpering on the roof. She rescued him and we all went back to playing baseball.

Later, when I developed enough good sense to realize what we had done to Garth and to understand why he was so angry in the first place, I of course felt guilty.  But now, several decades after the fact, my take on the whole situation is a little more nuanced.  Everyone was indeed playing a role in this dance and Garth played his with gusto.  I think he really needed a safe place to explode.  Climbing on roofs notwithstanding, we gave him that place.  None of us was the real reason for Garth's rage and the battles blew by like regular thunder storms.  In between, there were games, skating, listening to records, tossing footballs.  Very little in the way of permanent memory or resentment remained.

Like all social situations that are repeated in cyberspace, you meet a lot of Garths on the Internet. And the pack gloms on. The baiting and counter-baiting is almost endless.  There's even a measure of Garth-on-Garth violence.

I wish the Internet was as safe a place as our old neighborhood.  I'm not talking about predators or even bullies.  In cyberspace, all the fits and storms get cached away in UTF-8 characters with jpegs to make them seem pretty. On multiple servers. Garth isn't on the roof, he's bouncing off the satellites and streaming down the fiber cables at the speed of light. And the fits echo back almost endlessly. Nothing seems to disappear forever from cyberspace and anger has a special lasting power.

These are weird new dimensions added to a social phenomena that probably pre-dates even spoken language. Every once in a while it takes my breath away to think how much the virtual world is like the real world, and yet how unnervingly different it is, too.