One of the things I love about the Internet… Well, maybe the only thing I love about the Internet is the way it connects people. And that’s a good, solid building block. If it connects people, it can connect groups of people, and groups of groups, and so on, until world peace and eventually, mass collaboration on my giant robot…

So we can play Battlebots with space aliens.

But one step at a time.

The internet connects people. It’s given me a writers’ group… a book club… a really broad and interesting group of strangers to just talk about nothing and everything with. Most of them are people I would never have met in real life–distance and time would get in the way. Even the internet people who live closest to me. Without the ‘net, how would I know there was novelist like me in Kansas City? How would I find them?

The internet closes the gap. There are people I’ve never seen that I’ve been friends with for years. There are people who live on another continent that suddenly, I want to know better. And, with the internet, there’s no reason I can’t get to know them better. Distance is irrelevant.

More and more often, I find myself watching the news–seeing the bad things that are happening in far away places–and thinking of people by name.

Where is X? I hope Y made it out okay.

I want my friends to be safe. I want my world to be safe.

I’m looking at the news–at things that are happening right now, and things that happened yesterday and the day before, and the day before that–and I feel like a raving lunatic when I say this, but… I think we’re getting closer.

I weigh a handful of cherished names against all the violence and extremism in the world, and I see that we are winning.

Be safe, everyone.