Hello.  No, we probably haven't met (although if we have, you 
shouldn't have to read this because you already know what I'm going to 
say).  So for the moment, I'll assume we're perfect strangers.  You clicked
onto this from my homepage, and assuming you have a decent web-reader, 
you've seen my picture.  Therefore, you already know something very important 
about me: I am blue.

	Now before you laugh, snort, or just click on the Back icon, hear 
me out.  It will only take a minute or two of your time, and might help 
prevent a large number of problems down the road.  Still reading?  Good. :)

	I'm not going to waste your time and mine with a long-winded 
speech about the First Amendment, or about the rights of parents versus 
the rights of children versus the rights of internauts.  You can click 
onto the icons at the top of my homepage for that.  Heck, if you're 
reading this, you probably already believe it anyway.  That's the one 
problem with passing around emails flaming net.censorship.  In general, 
one ends up preaching to the choir.

	Instead, as I fancy myself a storyteller (albeit not a great one 
as of yet though I do try), I'm going to present an image for you, one 
you may or may not have considered before.

	In cyberspace, everyone is blind.  Christine will probably thwap 
me with a trout for this, but it is the truth.  When I send you a parody 
of a Dr. Seuss poem, or you send me a flame for my page, we have no idea 
whatsoever as to the true identity on the other end.  You could be female 
or male.  I could be blue.  We could both be hearing-impaired.  You might 
be seven feet tall.  I might be a lesbian.  You don't know about me.  I 
don't know about you.  Who is to say if any of the preceeding statements 
apply to either or both of us, and who really is to care?  A very close 
friend of mine whom I met over cyberspace can't see.  She can write 
extraordinarily well (ask her fans).  She has a mental list of dirty 
jokes longer than a football field.  I knew the latter two things about 
her long before I learned the first.  Had we met in real life, the first 
thing I would have seen about her would have been the guide dog.  My 
stereotypes (though I've fought long and hard to rid myself of them all) 
would have been firmly in place long before she opened her mouth.  
Although it makes me feel awful to say this, I have a suspicion that our 
relationship would have been far different, and I would have been the loser.

	The Net has no signs that say "Whites Only."  It doesn't have 
separate bathrooms for men and women.  It certainly doesn't have 
wheelchair accessible stairs.  It has, and will hopefully always have, 
just people.  You and me.  Talking.  Sharing.  Making friends from places 
we've only read about in the newspapers, or seen in poorly done movies on 
television.  And coming to love these people.

	Even in real life, there are crooks, there are slimeballs, there 
are people who prey on unsuspecting innocents.  Over the modem, yes it is 
much easier to hide, to pretend to be someone you're not and use that 
against someone else to hurt them.  However, anyone who has been online 
for any length of time has learned some degree of sense in dealing with 
other people, just like in the outside world.  Eventually, true 
personalities will show through, because you have only your personality 
to use here.  That's right.  No one cares if you're built like a football 
player, or like a dancer.  No one can see if you've combed your hair 
differently today, or bought a new coat.  You want to impress someone?  
Write a new line of code, or a poem, or a story.  Don't bother with 
fashion here.  Nobody sees your clothes; only your naked soul.

	What if you find someone, a friend, or perhaps more, in this 
strange playground of the world?  Should you chance a meeting in reality, 
perhaps shatter the fragile balance between truth and fiction that you've 
created between you over time?  You must decide for yourself.  I can tell 
you from personal experience that some of the people you have met and 
will meet are parasitical.  They will have one face online, and only show 
their true colors when you look into their eyes and see nothing but the 
same fears that you thought that you'd left behind you long ago.  Most, 
if not all, of the people who have met epals in real life have been 
burned like this at one point or another.  But this is not the only way 
it has to be.

	There will be other times, other friends, and there will come a 
day when you see a face step out of a car, or walk into a room, a face 
you've never seen, a voice you've never heard and yet ... familiar.  
Comforting.  Beloved.  Even if the body does not match your mental 
picture, the face not that of your dreams and fears of this day, one 
radiant smile, matched by your own, tells you that this is the same 
friend you have confided in, trusted, and yes, loved these past weeks or 
months or years.  The outer shell may be of a form or shade or origen in 
which you never dreamed that you could find a friend, because of where 
you grew, what you learned, who you used to be.  That doesn't matter now, 
and in fact, you may only notice for a moment, because the soul within is 
what you have seen, and what has brought you to this moment.  That is the 
single greatest thing about this electric common ground: here, every 
person is beautiful.

	It's a nice mental image, isn't it: friends meeting, stories 
sharing, information passed around at the speed of light regarding 
atmospheric particles or just idle daydreams of the future.  This is what 
the Net has become.  This is what the United States government has 
decreed to be intolerable, immoral, and dangerous: the first place ever 
where one cannot prejudge another on the basis of race, sex, disability, 
or any of a host of other things we use to define and separate ourselves.

	I won't beg/ask/tell you to write your representative in 
Congress, nor will I ask you to put up a blue ribbon, or black out your 
own homepage, or even tell your friends about this.  Whatever you do, so 
long as it harms no one else, is your own concern.  I ask only the same 
courtesy in return.  Thank you very much for your time.

	Before you click out, I suppose I do have one small request to ask of 
you, something that my own leaders have appeared to have forgotten.  
However, if I do this one thing, and you do it as well, and our friends 
tell their own friends, we may yet have a chance to save the Net from 
the destruction about to be wrought upon it by those who can see far 
less than even you or me.

				THINK