It is relatively easy to locate old friends online now, except those who share a name with too many others. But even when there are 20 Barbara Blanks, you can usually narrow it with a few keywords or checking for age and likely location. You can find news about them, even if it is now seven years old, or where they were living when their mother died in 2009, and in my generation, a FB page is likely.
I was sleepless and had been thinking of some people I knew in technical theater at
W&M, a man and a woman. They were in the rank of
second tier of friends, that group of about 20 people after the first
10. So I tried to find them online - it took about 10 minutes each. Doug
looked promising - he was not a believer when I knew him but had become
a Presbyterian minister. He has an autistic son adopted from Romania. I was looking for a way to communicate and then found
on his FB his photos, many of them with strong political messages and
then about a sermon he had just preached with the tagline "Along
with extolling Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a morally evolved humanity
and railing about the narcissistic greed of billionaires in space..." Pastor's with strong politics on their FB worry me - in any direction. So I
don't want to catch up with him after all.
The woman was similar. She is married and looks marvelous, but her FB page has
entry after entry of "No" symbols over guns and coathangers, plus a
photo (looks like at W&M old campus) of women in Handmaid's Tale
costumes. So I don't want to catch up with her either. It's who I have
become at this point - if that's the most important thing about you
that you have to lead with is signalling angry politics, then I'm not
interested.
Had I run into them at a reunion, the conversation might not have gone there - I am pretty good at steering people away right out of the gate before they have a chance to signal to me "Are you one of us?" as people do these days. I figure most of my college friends are liberals, and I'm still fine with talking to them. But it is simply a bad state of affairs that so many people need to get that billboard out there, knowing they are going to offend half the country but not caring, so great is their need to show what their tribe is. Because no, it's not that they care about these things so much that they are bravely risking criticism. People generally aren't even volunteering for advocacy for these things, let alone going out and doing anything for young women or people in dangerous areas. They care about the symbolism. It's all for show and they have to put it on a billboard.
Would I be just as irritated if they agreed with me more? I can think of examples in my favor, that I really do dislike the display more than the particulars. But I'll try to be alert in terms of what I actually do. My memory from FB was that my quickest "Don't follows" were two conservatives, followed by about ten liberals. But I may delude myself.
Before I retired, I had a rule about discussions at work: I would not talk about sex, politics, or religion. Once or twice I got dragged into a discussion on politics, and I always regretted it, so that rule served me well. When I started using Facebook, I carried over that rule, and only posted about pretty noncontroversial stuff.
ReplyDeleteThen came the 2016 election, and the aftermath. I didn't like Trump, didn't like his personality, didn't vote for him. I agreed with many of his positions, but didn't think he would actually follow through on them. When the Russia collusion hoax started being propagated, I initially believed it. It seemed like the kind of thing he would do - corrupt businessman, and all that.
But, as things unfolded, I started to become skeptical. Nothing seemed to make sense, the charges were outlandish and unbelievable, the investigation seemed like a partisan witch hunt. Still, would even someone as corrupt as Hillary Clinton attempt to pull off such a ridiculous stunt? And surely the FBI could not be that corrupt. Then the FBI emails were released, and overnight my opinion changed 180 degrees. It became clear to me that it was all a hoax, and probably the worst political crime in the history of the country.
Still, I kept my comments neutral. I valued my friendships, did not want to stir up enmity or strife. I watched through two absolutely pointless impeachments that tore apart the country, an endless stream of lies, violence tacitly endorsed the left, and a compromised election in 2020. Finally, what pushed me over the edge was the coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the Tony Bobulinski interview. When the story first broke, it was so damning I was sure it would kill the Biden campaign, but the left was incredibly effective at absolutely censoring the whole thing.
I finally had had enough, and I decided "screw it," or words to that effect. I was going to start posting about political issues and let the chips fall where they may. I made sure to post factual stories, things that could be defended, not just diatribes. I wanted to do my tiny part to get a little bit of the truth out there. If I lost some friends, so be it.
Well, a few FB friends have stopped following me, but none were people I was very close to. Most of my closer friends have either responded positively (to my surprise in a couple of cases - there seem to be a lot of closet conservatives out there), or do not comment at all. I have a few personal friends who are quite liberal, and I was afraid that I might lose some of them, but it does not seem to have affected our friendship at all, although we never talk politics when I see them in person.
So, I'm glad I made the change. It might offend a few people, but I have gotten a couple of comments on the order of "I didn't know that!", so maybe I am getting a little bit of truth out there.
You have to be pretty disagreeable these days to hold the middle ground. During the mourning of the Georgia Guidestones one of my left-wing friends was holding forth about how this kind of vandalism of monumental art by vigilantes needed to be punished. He had the good grace to see where I was going when I pointed out that there's been a little bit more of that kind of thing, really a lot of it recently, often by mobs of vigilantes; and that sometimes good anti-racists have joined in the throng to help destroy monumental art for ideological reasons.
ReplyDeleteIs there a rule, or not? Hard to say. But only the cruel point out that it's an issue.
I suppose I have a more cynical attitude--nuance or correction were not only never welcomed, they weren't tolerated. By and large, I gave up on correcting people, although I still object to the Easter = Oestre meme.
ReplyDeleteIf politics is the center of a friend's life--that's good to know. I'm warned.
In person I can sound friendly, but pixels are cold.
@ James - great last line
ReplyDeleteI mourn the lost world of ten years ago, but really things have been getting incrementally worse for decades. I've lost touch with some of the people I once relied on to discuss politics. Others have died. I can't replace them and I miss them. Maybe this is simply how it feels to get old. However, the politicization of so much of modern American life seems novel and is depressing.
ReplyDelete