Blessed

Thanks, Facebook.

You’ve made me a better person.

At first there was the novelty of seeing what my friends ate for lunch, pictures of their cats, vacations, kids, relationships, in and out of love, movies liked/hated, stupid jokes, and on and on. Then it became a bit harder edged with compilation videos of people getting hurt; we all love to see a guy falling off a roof. There were entreaties to believe in god, support the troops, kick cancer’s ass. Sometime later political posts flew around like seagulls over a dumpsite. Natural progression of social media, right? We told everyone what we thought goddamnit, why we knew shit, what we supported, tolerated, fought for. We didn’t actually do any of that, but we could talk about it as if we did. I hate this, I hate that. The conspiracy theorists made it unscientifically clear why they knew arcane secrets that I’d never understand. The anti-vaxx sacks ridiculed those of us who supported science, which for some reason, they knew for sure that science is a shady branch of the government. Many, many Facebook subscribers lectured the rest of us that our government was corrupt and all about money; like they had just discovered that fact.

The comments sections caught fire with long, long threads debating which political ideology was more evolved or Christian, which party would save America, which candidate was the biggest asshole. Man, that was fun. Remember? How much fun?

And it was. Fun. I recall pissing off some guy in Hawaii so badly that he threatened to fly to New Mexico and kill me. Aloha, dipshit. It was fun to think up new insults and to ridicule a bonehead for her/his stand on almost anything with which I disagreed. I got got a few times, but so what? It’s Facebook, not the United Nations. Not a real thing. It’s only a way to provoke the lonely, to occupy down time and to call people names that lived in another state. What? Are they going to hunt you down, kick your ass? I guess that’s possible. Oh, and let’s not forget the armies of 30, 40, 50 year old dickwads who spend all day “friending” underage women and the few who convinced the young ladies to slip out of their parents’ homes in the middle of the night to meet him at a nearby convenience store because of love. Facebook has opened up new worlds for the housebound, the terrified, the perverted. Glad for them.

Wow, I’ve spent hours stoking my abhorrence and feeling insecure because I didn’t think of a particular insult first or, kill me, someone may have found a grammar error in one of my responses and I want to die. My sense of self-loathing grew.

During the last week or so I’ve responded to a dozen posts that were either stupid, dangerous, uninformed, or else I didn’t like the person’s profile picture. Maybe I only wanted to be noticed, to let my “friends” know that I was still out here, alive and hostile.
But, here’s the part where I become a better person.

I didn’t send.

I didn’t click the “post” button. Before I hit “return” I looked at what I’d written, re-read the original post, the previous remarks, scanned others’ sentences and counted the misspellings, and I backed out my observations and abuses and walked away. I deleted my own words. Not an easy task when all you have to work with is words. But I did it. I did not comment.

The despair is still here, the feelings of alienation, disgust at racism and sexism from both the Left and the Right. I still avoid smug liberals and snotnosed conservatives, no changes in my point of view, my personal positions, but I simply don’t have to post them to social media.

Well, not all of them anyway. I’ve got some stuff percolating that will probably find its way to the great web of conformity, make myself a target, and, while I may not be a “better” person, I have a bit less animosity and I don’t need to boot up FB every time I’m my office to see if someone has topped my remarks, has humiliated me on the world stage or has “liked” what I had to say, has given me that all important cyber-pat on the back.

I read two books last week and watched a Japanese surrealist film, listened to nearly my entire collection of John Coltrane and most of Beethoven’s string quartets and I finished season 3 of Bojack Horseman and I’m all caught up with “The Handmaid’s Tale” and I downloaded two Judas Priest CDs. And read a Batman Comic.

Better person.