Politics, Baby

I'm on a road trip and I have a lot to say about it but not right now. At this moment I'm thinking about facebook and how it makes me privy to information about people that I might not know otherwise. In some cases I discover that I have more in common with someone than I ever thought, or that someone who seems kind of a non-entity in my mind has a rich inner life that is much more compelling that what one gets to know on the surface. In other cases I kind of end up a little sad because people express things that I can never un-know about them, and some of these things highlight aspects of their personality that I don't feel so great about. I have had many years of practice with that, growing up in a small midwestern town as the Unitarian but actually really atheist family among devout Lutherans and Catholics, most of whom were fairly unexposed to much diversity aside from the Methodists. Sometimes you had to ignore the crazy bigoted shit that was said on occasion unless you wanted no options at all socially. I did have a limit to my overlookiness, though, which got me into heated debates more regularly than was ideal.

On facebook, people seem to want other people to know who they are and what they stand for. Like with bumper stickers. By listing alliances and cutting and pasting epidemic statuses one constructs a persona. And I have found that vastly interesting for the most part. But every now and then I find it upsetting because someone posts something that categorizes them for me in a way that's hard for me to overlook. I'm sure we all have our WTFs?, and one for me was a status that went around for a while, and is probably now an "I like this so I am affiliated with it" thing; it was something about my favorite actor was so and so, and he died this year, my favorite singer was....and he died this year, et cetera, and finished with ...and my favorite president is Barack Obama." It was a prayer, maybe? Anyway the meaning was for God, since he is on a roll with causing the demise of the facebook-ee's favorite public figures, to just go ahead and include the president in that too since they've trickily designated him a favorite, ha ha.

I realize that this was probably hysterically funny to a whole bunch of people, in the same way that Ann Coulter is hysterically funny. But it was hard for me to get past the fact that some people I know and care about were wishing someone dead. I can totally get on board with not liking the president. That was Minnesota reserve, by the way. I spent eight years not liking the president. That was also Minnesota reserve. But wishing someone dead is icky to me. And it made me a little sad to see people that I know kind of gleefully jumping on that, because that kind of stuff divides people, in my mind, into categories that I don't love to have. I'm all for diversity of political thought, whether or not I understand how one arrives at one's position. And I like having the conversations that help me see other sides of issues I care about. But I sometimes regret knowing things about people that I wouldn't know if it weren't for facebook.