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Sea Shepherd/Bob Barker Antarctic Mission 2009/2010 Jo-Anne McArthur/Sea Shepherd |
The Steve Irwin is at sea and the Brigitte Bardot has departed from Los Angeles. The Nisshin Maru remains in dry dock in Hiroshima. The Bob Barker is preparing for departure from Sydney and the Sam Simon and myself remain in an undisclosed location. The manager of the El Torito restaurant in Marina del Rey reported to the crew of the Brigitte Bardot that a Japanese man with a video camera kept asking to move his seat to get different views of the Brigitte Bardot. The restaurant was overlooking the berth where the Brigitte Bardot was moored.
The Japanese spy for the whaling companies would have seen hundreds of supporters visiting the Brigitte Bardot bring donations of food, equipment and cash to support the campaign to stop the Japanese whaling fleet.
He may also have been looking for me, but I was not there.
The Japanese whalers can send in their spies but our spy network is much more effective, because our spies are whistleblowers who come forward to volunteer information on their own, like the manager of the El Torito restaurant in the Marina. By the way, if anyone goes for a meal there remember to thank him for looking out for the whales.
One very generous and moving donation came from Robin Pozniakoff, who brought down and presented the Bardot's crew with binoculars used by her father in the United States Navy in 1944. It is an honor indeed to have onboard binoculars that were used in the fight against Japanese military imperialism nearly seventy years ago. The crew reports that these binoculars, made especially for the United States Navy by Bausch and Lomb in 1943, are superior than most of the modern binoculars on the market today.
The Sam Simon and I remain in an undisclosed location making preparations for the upcoming interventions against the Japanese whaling fleet. Despite the cadre of lawyers with lawsuits and bogus charges they have thrown at us, despite their diplomatic pressures, despite their public relations expenditures all financed by the money they stole from the Tsunami victims, they have not shut down our campaign and they have not stopped me.
But we fully intend to stop them, because I intend to demonstrate that passion trumps money and my crews are more passionate about defending the whales than the whalers are about killing them, because we are driven by compassion, whereas they are driven by greed.
I have to say that the Solar eclipse yesterday was a fascinating sight for those of us fortunate to see it. It won’t happen again until 2015.
I was thinking today of the few people who write to tell me that they hate me because of what I do, or how I do what I do. They do not like that I protect whales, or they just don’t like the way I go about saving whales, apparently. Not that I care, since I work to protect whales for the sake of the whales and not to please people, but it is a curiosity as to why people take the time to write to tell me that they hate me because of what I do and how I do it.
Not that this is a revelation. I have received thousands of hate messages and hundreds of death threats over the years, and for the most part, I have found it all very amusing.
I especially like the ones that accuse me of being violent and follow up with the accusation that they hope someone kills me.
In my entire career I have never injured a single person, but these people don’t want to confuse their ideology with reality and thus the simple fact that they don’t like what I do or how I do it translates into me being a violent person.
But the reason I bring this up is because of the fact that many people, especially on internet social networks, are attacked and bullied by others. For some this is intimidating, threatening, and depressing.
As someone who has been most viciously attacked for decades, I simply would like to offer some advice.
Ignore these people. They are simply energy sucking vampires.
As Chris Guillebeau wrote in his book The Art of Non-Conformity: “If you want to make a lot of people hate you, all you need to do is be successful doing something you love.”
And the more you succeed, the more vicious become the critics.
What I have found is that those who waste energy attacking the deeds of others do not themselves contribute anything positive to the world.
As Albert Einstein once observed: “Great spirits have always been violently oppressed by mediocre minds.”
And don’t worry if people talk crap about you. As Oscar Wilde once wrote: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
So the more haters and the more angry critics that you recruit, the more reassurance you will have that you are on the right path and doing the right thing.
These are my rules for dealing with haters: (1) If you don’t know someone personally i.e. if they are not close friends or family, their opinion of you is irrelevant. (2) If you are criticized positively by friends and family, listen to them, if criticized negatively, or with malice, ignore them also. (3) Any comment left on internet postings by people you don’t know, are unimportant and should not even be read. (4) If someone leaves a negative comment on your Facebook page all you need to do is delete the comment and ban them. DO NOT respond because that just encourages and empowers them. (5) Most importantly of all, remember that you need not answer to anyone but your own conscience. Thus you need not respond to any criticism unless you can determine if there is anything positive to be gained by responding, and usually there isn’t.
The one thing I have found is that these kind of hateful people absolutely despise being ignored, and thus, that is the best way to deal with them.
I used to respond sometimes to people I did not know because I found it amusing to do so, but over time I realized that giving encouragement to these kind of faceless people was not a positive thing, no matter how amusing I felt it to be.
I do, however, respond to some of my traditional enemies, people I knew or know, that have actual faces, like corporate public relations whores like Patrick Moore or the public relations lackey for the whaling industry Glen Inwood, for example, because I know them and what I can gain is to expose their hypocrisy and provoke thought about their championing of industries assaulting nature.
