Death And Life On The Internet
In the eerie light of the Heaven's Gate suicides, including that of a young Sag Harbor woman whom many here once knew and liked, the Internet, and its World Wide Web, has became the focus of fear and anger. What is not understood, or is perceived as mysterious, is all too often the target of suspicion, and this tragedy fits the pattern all too well.
Because the cultists who died in California made their living as Web page designers, many, among them politicians and the media, have implicated the new technology in their deaths. The Web was wide open to attack already, of course, the home of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and peddlers of pornography.
"Are your children safe from online cults?" more than one newscaster asked in the days following the deaths.
But fanatics like those in Rancho Santa Fe have been around forever. End-of-the-worlders abound in every culture, East and West. History has shown that their numbers and influence expand as a century winds down, and that they are at their zenith with an approaching millennium.
The people who died in Heaven's Gate did not die because of the Web. If anything, they died because of the age in which they lived.
Another event, also close to home, was announced via the Internet the same week as the suicides. This one attracted just as intense interest, albeit among only 20 or so fifth-grade children.
Osprey X4, having finished her long winter vacation at Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela by way of Haiti, arrived back on her nest, near the South Ferry landing on Shelter Island. The fifth-graders at the Shelter Island School, who call X4 Kid, found out about her arrival almost as soon as it happened - not from the Nature Conservancy volunteers who reported her presence, but from the Web.
The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, according to a report by Paul Stoutenburgh, the nature columnist for The Suffolk Times, had been following X4 and her Mashomack Preserve buddies X5 (a.k.a. Chestnut) and X7 (Fisher) all winter, tracking the birds' course via tiny radio transmitters and plotting it on a Web page called Highway to the Tropics.
The fifth-graders have a big map in their classroom, on which they have been marking the paths of the migrating fish hawks. As Mr. Stoutenburgh observes, you can imagine how they must feel when they go outside and see the very birds.
On Tuesday, when we checked Highway to the Tropics -http://www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu - Chestnut was somewhere between Richmond, Va., and Shelter Island; Fisher hadn't been heard from for a few weeks.
The value of the Internet is real, and can be life-affirming.