The Psychology and Politics of Unfriending
As of 7:00 a.m. today, I have precisely 701 Facebook “friends.” For reasons largely unknown (perhaps the relative boredom of isolation), I decided to cull through this list and see how many of the 701 I could identify. I’m happy to report that easily more than half were known to me; a mixture of family, old school-mates, fellow “Hollywood Brats,” political people, students and colleagues from various universities, former synagogue youth group/summer camp chaverim (Hebrew for “friends”) and former and current congregants. Then too, there were literally dozens whom I had virtually no idea of who, how and why they were on my friends list, and more than a handful of people who were no longer alive . . . although their Facebook pages were still “idly active.” All this took somewhat a bit less than 2 hours.
After (sadly) deleting the deceased, I started looking over the pages of people I couldn’t for the life of me identify. That’s when it dawned on me that if I checked out who was on their friends list that might explain our “relationship.” In many cases, it was but a single individual we had in common. One such person - a writer who had one of my politics students on her list - had just posed a message stating, in part, “It's after midnight Sunday night, and I can't begin to think about getting to sleep. Listening to the things Trump said today has made that impossible. I know I have a number of "friends" on FB who support this man, and I have come to the end of my tolerance for you. Tonight I am unfriending all of you—and I don't care if we have been friends for decades or if we are related by marriage or blood. . . .You are no longer my friends or relations, on Facebook or in real life. Don't contact me to defend your position; I never, ever want to hear from you again. Goodbye.”
To be perfectly honest (unlike the POTUS), I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree with this Facebook friend. To unfriend or not to unfriend: that is the question. On the one hand, I really, truly hate the nausea and bile that well up every time I read the words of praise these otherwise intelligent, successful people heap upon their miscreant-in-chief. But who ever said that just because a person is successful it follows that they understand thing one about civics, civility or sanity? Ridding oneself of the bile is as simple as pressing the “unfriend” button . . . one, two, three and voila! They and their noxious nostrums have evaporated into the political putrescence. But it comes at a price: knowing that they are forever gone from my life. On the other hand, there is a part of me that truly wants to believe that to unfriend those who are intolerably smug and small is to make me far less a mentsch - a decent human being - than I could cope with. But then I remember that quote from Winston Churchill: “Never give in, never, never, never–never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
This week’s essay is the 874th I’ve posted since February 2005 back when this blog was called “Beating the Bushes.". In all these years, I’ve received thousands upon thousands of comments . . . most praiseworthy, many thoughtful, and more than I care to remember nasty and vile. Since many are sent to one of my many email addresses, I have the ability to pre-screen and send the writers of vile drek directly into the various spam files. I must admit that every once in a while I do read what these folks write. Some are so strident as to be a stitch; others are threatening, horribly misspelled, and make me proud to have come from a bright, well-educated family. With Facebook it’s a bit different. If you want to keep the rest of your little world from seeing just how nuts and politically poisoned people can be, you first must unfriend them. But then I think: what do I care if the rest of my readers think they’re village idiots? That’s their - e.g. the village idiots - problem!
While I can certainly applaud my anonymous Facebook friend’s decision to unfriend all those who persist in being aggressively, aggravatingly pro-Trump – despite all the lies, the inability to accept the input of those far, far better versed than he, and that otherworldly egomania - I myself cannot push these folks overboard. Of course, I don’t have to read their screeds. Sooner or later they will suffer loss, and may well come to grasp that there are more things under heaven and earth than can ever be blamed on Obama and Clinton, Pelosi, Biden, George Soros or even Dr. Fauci.
In the long run, unfriending those who annoyingly, flippantly oppose one’s political point of view and hate you for not loving Trump and all he stands for (and against) will, it seems to me, do next to nothing. On the other hand, supporting those who agree can at least let you know that there are more sane people in the world than you ever dreamed of. Instead of grousing get cracking; there are candidates to support and elections to be won. There’s a country and a world to be saved . . .
“Never give in, never, never, never–never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”
219 days until the next election.
Be well, read books and watch movies, be extra nice to those you are quarantined with and WASH YOUR HANDS!
Copyright ©, 2020, Kurt F. Stone