When Facebook Becomes A Weapon

                I used to think the rise of the internet and the advent of social media as being the most amazing thing to happen in our generation.  It gave someone like me, who has always struggled socially, the ability to connect with others on a deeper level, rather than struggling to make conversation during a chance encounter in the grocery store.  Over the years, I’d often thought that without it, I’d have morphed into a stereotypical virginal old maid, the sort of crabby patty who screeches at kids for stepping on their lawn.  Instead, I have been allowed to blossom socially despite my awkwardness.  I thought I would always be grateful for this invention.

                Since the 2016 election, I’ve changed that outlook.  I’ve begun to view Facebook and social media negatively.  First, because it often showed me sides of people I wish I didn’t see.  People whom I looked up to and admired are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and lacking in compassion.  Second, because social media is now being used in much the same fashion as the stocks and pillory were in Puritan New England, as a way to socially shame someone. 

                We’ve all had bad days, but we’re good people overall.  Should a lapse in judgment on a bad day, like yelling at a waiter who screws up your order, destroy your entire life?  Should that one moment in time define all the rest you have on earth?

                Social media was a tool.  Now it’s a weapon.

                What has motivated this post is watching two people I have literally known all my life once again have a messy, very public breakup played out over social media.  It is always sickening and gross, the social media equivalent of rubbernecking at a bad traffic accident.  You can’t look away, despite how disgusting you find this behavior, the same way you’d stare at a person who drops their trousers and defecates in public.

                It’s like watching a soap opera.

                Social media should never be used as a weapon to club someone you have claimed, at least a hundred times, to love.  If you had a shred of respect for that person, you would not publicly humiliate, degrade, and drag them through the mud in front of an audience of people who have known you both all your lives.  It would be different if you were relating an abstract experience concerning an anonymous ex that your audience does not know.  It becomes humiliation when everyone knows this person.  Even worse when you know reputation and image is important to them.  You are deliberately destroying something precious to them, then toss out a casual reference to them being mentally ill as the explanation for their behavior, which makes it even worse.

                Yes, maybe they are mentally ill.  Mentally ill means they will occasionally act out; is humiliating and embarrassing this person all over social media an appropriate response?  Does it make you a good person?  No, it means you’re seeking validation regarding what a saint you are for putting up with this sick person.  Your need for validation and attention is trumping their need for dignity. 

                My boyfriend has MS.  There are times his illness has created challenges.  The last thing I would ever think of doing is taking to social media to broadcast this to the entire world to deliberately embarrass him.

                  People cannot help being sick.  People do not ask to be schizophrenic or bipolar or depressed anymore than they ask to get cancer or MS or Lupus or all the other illnesses out there.  Humiliating someone for displaying symptoms of an illness makes you an asshole.  And karma tends to be a real bitch about this shit.

                There it is, I said it. 

                What you are doing is the equivalent of ranting and raving because a cancer patient threw up in your car after chemotherapy. 

                You are not a nice person, despite what you’d like everyone else to believe.

                It takes a special person to deal with a loved one that has a chronic illness.  I’ve always understood this, having worked in a nursing home for seven years following my college graduation, and having helped care for my father when he was dying of cancer.  Not everyone has the temperament to be someone’s caregiver.  There is strength and integrity in admitting this.   It is better to recognize this, rather than wind up abusing and hurting someone.   And make no mistake, publicly humiliating and degrading them is a form of abuse.  You are hurting them in a way they may not be able to recover from; and for what?  Because they pissed you off?  You’ll be over it in a couple of weeks and acting like it never happened.  You are permanently damaging someone’s reputation over a temporary problem.

                The internet is forever.  The stuff you write does not go away.  A few months from now when this has blown over and you’re all lovey dovey again  (it’s like a train wreck no one can look away from) and you’ve deleted all those posts, EVERYONE remembers them.  In fact, we’re all rolling our eyes because we know it’s only a matter of time before the next explosion. 

                At the end of the day, you don’t look any better than the person you think you’re exposing and smearing.  Facebook is not a knife to stab people with.  Don’t be the embodiment of everything that is currently going wrong with our society.