An Open Letter

AN OPEN LETTER TO THOSE ON MY FACEBOOK FRIENDS LIST

Dear family, friends, and acquaintances:

This morning I came to a crossroads that required me to make a decision. This decision was brought about by the culmination of feelings about posts made by two separate people. One of them posted about the Baltimore protests/riots which occurred on 4/27/15, and the other was Bruce Jenner’s recent interview from 4/24/15.

That decision is this: If you have not heard from me in a while, it is because I have either un-followed or unfriended you.

I do not take this decision lightly as, if you are on my friends list, I have found value in our relationship, and in you as a person. Enough so that I wish to remain in contact with you as you have impacted my life in such a way that I view you as worth having in it.

That being said, you can post what you want on your page. It’s your page.

But please, keep in mind that while it is your page, it is also a public forum. And this may come as a surprise to you, but not everyone in the world shares your viewpoint; and not everyone in the world is going to side with you when you post dramaticized, fear-driven, ignorance based, media fed photographs and videos.

Just because you took an Into to Social Problems class as an elective and you remember a Karl Marx or Malcolm X quote that fits the situation, you are not an expert on what is going on in Baltimore.

Same goes for that Into to Gender Problems class you took.

You are an expert in nothing except your own life

Telling me that sometimes you have to be violent in order to be heard does not make me believe you understand what #AllLivesMatter is really about. It makes me believe you are ignorant and socially near sighted.

Telling me that Bruce is “sick” and that there is no need to change what God has already made perfect does not make me believe you are a Christian. It makes me believe you are a hypocrite with your dyed hair, painted nails, pierced ears, and tattoos.

So again, I have un-followed or unfriended you. Not because I don’t love you, but because it upsets me to see that someone that I have allowed to be so close to me has values that are so far from me that it hurts.

It upsets me a great deal.

And I refuse to give someone else that much control over my life and my happiness.

Don't You Have Something More Important You Should Be Doing?

I've seen some pretty crazy stuff. I don't know what it is - I think I'm a weird shit magnet. I get to see things, and these things typically defy human imagination. And as luck would have it, I'm typically the only who sees these things when they happen so I have no one to talk to about it. I have no one to rationalize with. "Maybe they were dropped as a child" is usually the first, and typically best, answer that I come up with.

All this being said...this is a new one to me.

This gem of a screenshot comes from a fan. This was on her news feed and was posted back in late September by someone she went to high school with.

Comedian Lewis Black said during a commencement speech which he delivered to UC San Diego
Thurgood Marshall College, "If you're doing two things at once, guess what, you aren't doing either!"(by the way, if you're interested in watching that speech, you can check it out by clicking here).

I'm not all that impressed with people who post every little action they're up to on Facebook in the first place. I don't care that you're eating at a restaurant that is in your home town because I know you've eaten there 100 times already. Additionally, I don't care to see what it is that you're eating while you're there. I don't care if it's the best steak that you've ever had. I don't care if you've never had flounder like that before. Unless you're dining with the British Royal Family while in Tibet, accompanied by Dalai Lama, and the meal was prepared by a nude Giada De Laurentiis...I'm not interested.

But doesn't this take over sharing to the ultimate level? Do we really need to know that she is questioning whether or not she is in labor. Furthermore, once she had the definitive answer, do we really need to know that she is in actual labor and that she is on her way (Google Map provided for your navigation convenience) to the hospital?

What happened to living in the now? In the aforementioned commencement speech, Lewis Black also said, "You can only be in one now at a time." Be in the now, whatever that now may be. If your now is a shitty 9 to 5 job, at least be there if it's the only way to support your family. If your now is a shitty prerequisite class for your major, get your ass to class. If your now is childbirth, give birth to your child. Hopefully she doesn't turn out to be the mom who is so attached to electronics that she neglects her actual child in order to play The Sims on Facebook to take care of her virtual child, thus inflicting upon her birth child reactive attachment disorder.

I can only hope that one of the 30+ comments on these status posts went something like this...

"GET OFF YOUR FUCKING PHONE AND DELIVER YOUR CHILD, YOU TWIT!"