A Little Freakin' Spring House Cleaning

Last week I started cleaning up my Facebook page.  No, it wasn’t one of those, "if I haven't talked to you in the last few months on here I'm deleting you from my 'friend list'" things.  It's not as if Facebook is the be all/end all criteria of friendship.  Some of the people on my list I've known since kindergarten.  Some I've never met.  Some I haven't seen since high school graduation or before, and  there are those on my list whose path I may never cross.  That's ok.  It's probably called a 'friends' list because 'some people I love, some people I tolerate, some people I've never met, and some people I've unfollowed because they always post stupid crap' list takes too much space.

I've been spending some time 'unfollowing' a butt-ton of political pages I was following on my personal Facebook page.  Yes, I'll still be sharing my "Stitt for Governor" material because I love my job.  I KID!!  I DO love my job,  but I share the posts because he's a good man and I think he'd do a better job than the other yahoos (there, I said it….like my dad would have) currently running for the office.  Most of the rest of the pages that have any kind of political bent, I've deleted.

Why, you say?  Because I care more about my health than I care about clickbait.  What is clickbait?  Wikipedia says:  Click-bait is a web page link designed to entice users to go to a certain web-page or video. Click-bait headlines typically aim to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing just enough information to make readers curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content.  Pasted from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait> 

You've seen it a thousand times on Facebook.  You know…people who read a headline and form an opinion on that headline without reading the entire article, which in many cases looks nothing like the headline.  Clickbait depends upon the inherent laziness and gullibility of humanity, and they know that most people will never click the article to read it in full.  That's WAY too many words and WAY too much work to read the article.   The sad thing is that news outlets, even local news, has bought into this load of fecal matter.  So that's going to make the news outlets look more credible, is it?? 

It's not a left or right issue either.  I've seen it from nearly every political bent across the spectrum.  No one has a corner on the market.  Unfortunately, what began with less than reputable, no named sources has filtered into the mainstream.  Why?  Because it works.  And it seems to be worse now than ever before.  Like him or not (and most don't), POTUS has brought highly charged reactions on both sides of the fence.  And no, I don't want to hear all of the reasons you're rabidly FOR the man, and no, I don't want to hear all of the reasons you think he's an a$$hole.  I've heard too much already.

I miss Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite who simply reported what was going on.  Opinion pieces were clearly labeled as such, and the line between analysis and opinion wasn't so completely blurred.  Now the news media seems to do everything they can to encite people, and people are becoming less rational and more extreme in their nearly violent emotional knee jerk reactions to seemingly opposing views.

I miss the days when individuals with differing opinions could sit down without calling each other libtard or cuckservative, clearly demonstrating their intellectual prowess, and hash out ideas without machine gun strafing ad hominem attacks on their opponents.  You want to ban assault weapons??  Start there. 

My Facebook had pages from conservative, liberal, and independent sites.   Some of those pages were self-cleaning.  It's strange to me that one can reply with a reasonable, respectful argument for or against a particular position or opinion, that a page would block you simply because your opinion differs.  Are we so emotionally fragile these days that our beliefs and opinions (I'm relatively sure that no one has the corner on absolute political truth), that we can't be challenged?  Have we stopped leaving the door open to the possibility that we might actually be WRONG??  I've always tried to do that, and I tried to impress that upon my kids.  Too many parents apparently haven't done likewise.

I began to find my blood pressure and anger rising as I scrolled through my Facebook timeline and witnessed some of the cowardly fights that take place with people safely hiding behind their monitors and keyboards firing their assault weapons (see above) randomly at their detractors.  THAT'S gotta be helpful.   I'm sure they enjoy the accolades of their like-minded friends as those people witness their weak-minded attempts to verbally mow down political opponents.  My attempts to get individuals to focus on the issue rather than how clever they could be with their personal attacks seemed to be more frequently falling flat. In fact, more times than not, if I wasn't blocked from a Facebook page, I saw the red laser dot on MY chest.  Wow.

So, since I value my health more than useless but damaging political Facebook war games, I've started deleting pages.  You know, it was liberating.  Almost instantly I began to feel my blood pressure lower and my IQ rise.  I'll leave the foolish and stupid emotionally explosive arguments which yield nothing but hatred and vitriol, and leave a wake of ignorance and damaged people to those who don't care if their life is shortened for nothing.  I'll save it for my personal response at the voting booth.

I'm remembering that humanity isn't going to be improved by a solid constitutional republic.  We're not going to be saved by a democracy or by socialism.  We're not going to be better off with Trump in or out of office, or by any other POTUS.  Am I grateful to live in the US?  Of course.  Will I vote?  Indeed, I understand the privilege.  Fake news and fake solutions.  I know THE answer lies elsewhere.   Love conquers all...I'll focus on Him.  The rest is really meaningless. FG