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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (22987)	8/18/2001 2:36:16 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

Well, you may have to do a bit more than that, when a horse bolt and starts to run wild gentle words in its ears are seldom sufficient to stop it in its tracks. But I take your point. That's the danger of flame wars. Flame really is an apt term. I did some firefighting when I was young and healthy, and it's a scary business. Flame wars are like fires that may smolder for awhile, letting off nothing but some telltale smoke that doesn't give any real warning of the danger lurnking. Then suddenly the flare up into a fireball that feeds on itself and grows in mere seconds completely out of control. It is fierce, unrelenting, caring nothing about anything in its path, feeding on whatever may come within its purview, until either by the application of immense amounts of water (we didn't have foam in my day) or from running out of fuel it dies down. And what is left is an acrid, gooey, yucky mess that takes a lot of work to clean up and the smell of which may take months or years to fully dissipate. But egad, being in the middle of them makes you more alive, more vibrant, more somehow real than almost anything you can imagine.