My relationship with social media is a strange one. Facebook doesn’t want to boost my posts–imagine, they don’t want to take my money–because in the past year I used a totally harmless word in the context of saying it was a part of our lives and affected things. They’re too busy to filter out content that isn’t violating the rules and let it go through, but at least I’m not in “Facebook Jail” and forbidden to do anything at all. When I’m not trying to make sense of how my blog posts fit into the grand scheme of worldwide readership, I also post general observations inside the site itself, just like everybody else, and try to figure out what people are thinking and what makes them tick.
Sometimes I get them ticked off for little or no reason.
Somebody recently posted a large image which said rather negative things about our nation’s head of the current administration. Since it came from a woman, and I had grown tired of trying to have a decent conversation with men who just seemed to want to pick a fight, I replied and asked what she had to say about the previous administration. I think I worded it as “What did you think of the last guy?”
Well folks, you would think I had disparaged her mamma. Not only did she not produce a word in answer to my question, but a man came in swinging in defense of her going off about how things are so bad now. He added similar observations. I felt like I was in one of those movie tropes in which I suddenly found myself outnumbered by a growing mob of unsavory characters smacking two-by-fours in their hands and producing brass knuckles from their pockets. And I didn’t say anything negative at all! I just asked, “What did you think of the last guy?”
She wanted me to go first instead, so she could shoot down whatever I said, and I wasn’t taking the bait. He then questioned my overall mindset, suggesting I am supporting the collapse of the world as we know it and so on. In the end, I simply apologized for asking a simple question and let it die down.
This is the kind of attitude which will continue to hold our society hostage to fear, prejudice and ignorance. When somebody asks what you think about something, if you’re so worried about being thought poorly of because of your opinion, maybe it’s time to think about the cause you are embracing. If I had received some response such as “I thought he did this right,” or “He certainly did better on this topic than the guy we have now,” it would have made for an interesting discussion. Instead, she stayed behind a curtain of uncertainty and poked her head out to pick on me instead.
Another example of when asking a question is a bad thing, along with those old questions about why is the sun in that position at that time of day, how do we sail our ships to the New World, or why did milkmaids with cowpox never catch smallpox? Don’t ever ask questions, unless you want to not be cheated out of possibly discovering something. What is this world coming to?
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