I'm Back and I'm Nuts

Well, I've been back from Peru for two weeks now. Sorry I have not written, but things have been very hectic and I got a nasty couple of bites on my right hand from a very angry anaconda--a juvenile at about 8 feet that was caught in a fishing net, and when I later tried to pick her up I missed by enough for her to nail me. She nailed me again as I tried to snap her off. The result was extreme numbness in my right thumb and right ring and pinkey fingers. Not from poison, as anacondas are not poisonous, but from just biting deeply enough to get some nerves or muscles out of whack. The feeling is coming back slowly and I can finally type again.
   Lots of other stuff going on as well.
   Some of it involves me getting way too angry on facebook at friends who copy and paste political lies. Twice now I have allowed myself to get trapped in stupid rants that make sense at the time but which I later wish I could eliminate from people's memories. The crux of the problem is not with people who disagree with my political position, it lies in people who simply repeat obvious lies. Why respond at all? It's just nonsense, right?
   Well, yes, except that it has real life consequences. If someone copies and pastes something from a source known to make up bs about, say, the new healthcare, well, people might believe that, and not bother to look into what is really going into the new healthcare bills being written. And if that happens, and those bills become law, people are going to die with no healthcare insurance. That is a real life consequence of a lie and I have a hard time ignoring those things.
   Now calling out the lie isn't the problem. The problem is that when people on the thread shout me down as not knowing the truth, I respond, and twice recently I've wound up calling people stupid or brain dead or idiots, that sort of thing. In other words, I have let myself get caught in traps--or maybe it would be more honest to say I ran into the traps full speed--that reduced me to a jerk and caused any validity of my initial reaction to the lies to lose all of its power.
  So I need to stop that. I have no excuse and am embarrassed by my behavior.
  So stop it, Gorman. Let's let those things stand and start over, beginning this morning.
  Hope you all made it through the winter okay.