“You can take a cue from my colleagues in Switzerland, who kindly told their peer to find a way to engage respectfully or to leave. I mean, if you are hosting a guest or building any kind of collective, why would you allow your community to treat someone disrespectfully? It’s really that simple. ”

I almost didn’t read it. Why? The title “Your failure of imagination is not my problem” raised both personal and professional hackles.

First, the personal: As a child, parent and grandparent, I have been on both sides of conversations that ended when one of the parties angrily said something along the lines of “You don’t love me. You don’t understand me. It’s all your fault.” Never worked for me, on either side of the argument, not even once.

Second, the professional. I worked for over a decade as a copywriter in an advertising agency. When I was hired, a senior writer, a woman named Alice Buzzarte, took me aside and said, “John, to succeed in this business you will need a thick skin. At least three out of four of your brilliant ideas are going straight into the trash can.” That statement was optimistic. If I wrote something and nobody liked it, I couldn’t blame their failure of imagination. I had to come up with something else.

I think a lot about that because, to be frank, when I think of the places I’ve hung out online to discuss anthropology, the old, now defunct Ning version of OAC, the Open Anthropology Cooperative and Ethnographers Facebook pages, and, yes, Anthro {dendum], everywhere the conversation has died. Why is that? Is it because the hundreds, sometimes thousands of individuals who visit these sites all suffer from a collective failure of imagination? What else could be going on?