Anyone with e-mail gets a lot of messages with inspirational messages, tips on how to live a good life and be a good person. Most of us read them and go on with our lives pretty much as they were before we hit the delete key. Pretty soon we forget the cyber sentiment—unless something triggers a tiny techno-bit of do-unto-others data.

An event at last week’s Texarkana College board meeting tripped my random access memory, which defaulted to an e-mail I got not long ago.

The e-mail concerned four things we never can recover: a stone after it’s thrown, a word after it’s sp...