Idealism Friction

When a dear old friend of your departed sainted mother tells you about how terrible it was that some anonymous wit wrote somewhere on "the internet" that she should not be given any jobs with children "or small animals," it's very difficult to repeat the free speech party line "No one has a right to not have their feelings hurt."

Difficult, but not impossible, it turns out!

But there are some victories no one should be proud of; every person annoyed by the truth is another failure on my part to be sufficiently inoffensive.

I think that reputation management services will be the next growth industry to target the elderly in the way that identity theft protection services did.  In the same way, they will be small, fly by night operations of questionable utility, whose reassuring commercials play constantly between network news segments.