Like many Americans, I’ve been thinking about my relationship to Facebook. A few months ago, I wrote that the Facebook party might be over. Since that time, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone…only to reinstall it two months later because I was still going to the website several times a day anyways, and the app just makes it a hell of a lot easier to share things.
Plus, as I wrote in that previous post:
Facebook is a great tool for knowing — at least on a superficial level — what’s going on in the lives of the people I know, people I once knew, and people I want to know better.
So I’ve decided to keep my Facebook account. But I do want to change the way I use it.
Since President Trump’s inauguration, and in the years leading up to it, we’ve all witnessed (and been part of) the way politics has taken over our democracy. I’m not just talking about the partisan bickering. That’s been a part of our democracy since Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans.
I’m talking about the way politics has ingratiated itself into virtually every conversation and every interaction. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I try not to start conversations about politics, but I rarely prevent myself from participating in them.
I believe the personal is political. To attempt to separate personal matters from political matters is to commit the crime of privilege. Only the most privileged people in our country have the luxury to ignore the downstream effects of the decisions made in Washington D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. Only the most privileged can pretend that “not talking about something” is the same thing as “being civil.”
But there has to be a space where people can come together to empathize with each other’s stories, a space where there is no “us” and “them” but just “me” and “you,” where I can talk to you about a funny thing my daughter said and neither of us feels the urge to mention the way, less than a month ago, our government “roused…hundreds of migrant children…in the middle of the night [and] loaded [them] onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.“
There has to be a space where you can share a picture of your grandmother on her 100th birthday and neither of us feels the need to mention the way our society fails to provide adequate care to millions of elders due to the for-profit nature of our healthcare system.
A space where you and I can meet, smile, and care about one another without asking ourselves how our words and actions will effect the results of the next election.
I’ve decided to try to create that space on my personal Facebook page.
With that being said, I hope you want to engage with me outside of the bubble of that peaceful, partisan-free space. I also hope that you have found my more politically-minded blog posts to be interesting and thought provoking, or that they’ve challenged you or inspired you to think differently about a topic or opened your mind to a perspective you hadn’t considered.
If so, I hope you’ll follow my new Facebook page for Fluid Imagination. If not, I hope you’ll remain my friend.