We have lived long enough for internet people to die. By this I mean, I’m in my 50s and I’ve been online most of my adult life. I know people I’ve never met in real life; that is, I’ve corresponded with people whom I’ve never seen with my own two eyes. I have friends in places I can’t even pronounce, like Taguig City. Some of these people no longer post online. They’ve disappeared.

When my fourth child was 15, I took a research paper writing class from a college in New Mexico. We lived in Wisconsin and I’ve never traveled to New Mexico, but Clovis Community College was at the time the least expensive place to take online classes that was open to high school students. Our children took their classes. When I decided to finish my associates degree, Clovis was the logical choice.

I had already graduated two students from homeschool. I was a stellar high school and college student myself; I didn’t need a research paper writing class. I had taught it! But them’s the rules, if I want a paper showing I can do associates level work.

So I registered for the class and received an online syllabus. It was from the dean of the English department. He wanted us to write our research papers on Peak Oil and the catastrophes predicted when the world runs out of petroleum. This was in the early aught’s; the focus of the course was to be watching “An Inconvenient Truth”, a movie by Al Gore. I saw what the instructor wanted, and I objected. I wrote him an email; what if I watch the movie and disagree with it?

This English department dean replied, “Well, I’m not a scientist, but it’s pretty certain. I’m sure you will be convinced.” He implied that our papers would have the right conclusions, regardless of our writing ability.

That made me see red. As an educator, a mom of several children going into college, and a student of all things, I refuse to have my opinion dictated to me.

I can write. I know I can write. And I write what I’m thinking, not what he thinks.

So I contacted the dean’s superior, telling her what he said, and asking to be removed from his class. I told her I felt he had overstepped his bounds and that he should be teaching his subject material, not other sciences. She moved me to a different online section. I got a new instructor, a woman who still had us research Peak Oil; that much was the dean’s decision. But she was free to look at the quality of my writing.

The result was a semester spent digging into the breadth of the internet. We learned how to use Diigo, a service to tag articles online so we could share them with our classmates and find them again later. My classmates found various things; I don’t think I even looked at the articles they tagged. I found truly fascinating things: a list of uses for hemp; using bamboo to produce polyester cloth; fracking good and bad; huge oil reserves; wasteful oil practices; biofuel economics.

One thing I found on a tangent was by Dave Doroghy, about his work for McDonald’s. In the 1970s there were lots of clowns hired to play Ronald McDonald across the country. One of them was in a televised helicopter accident at a restaurant and suspected to be injured or dead. This clown went on national television as Ronald McDonald; no matter how the reporters poked him, he stayed in character. He said his life had been saved by wearing his seatbelt, and he told his young viewers they needed to wear theirs, too. Mr. Doroghy was at the Ronald McDonald convention where this clown got to tell his story to other Ronalds and restaurant executives, and be recognized for his heroic staying in character and making a tragedy useful.

Dave Doroghy posted the story on his webpage twenty years ago. I found it again, linked in my Diigo files from my college emails back in 2012. The thing making me tear up now, is that the last post from Dave Doroghy was in 2013; the story page last updated in 2007.

Yesterday I looked up Douglas Adams fan sites. Most of the links were dead. I know, logically, that it takes only a few days for some links to be obsolete. I’ve seen the meme, “Your attachment is not as visible as you think.” But truly, the people who were there, vibrant, active, are not there now, and never will be again. It’s like looking at a bunch of tracks in the woods. The evidence is there, but no life.

“Where’s My Ronald?” by Dorg: http://www.dorg.ca/stories/9/WheresMyRonald.pdf, retrieved Sept 20, 2024.

P.S. Who’s maintaining Doroghy’s website now? Is it running on steam? Or is there a family member or friend lovingly checking on it now and then?

P.P.S. Not only has petroleum not ended, there’s more found; bamboo cloth is in Walmart, and we’re getting natural gas from landfills.