Yes, I am on Facebook (until FB eventually pisses me off enough with its intrusiveness that I finally am forced to bail.) So is my dad, and yes, I have "friended" him.
My dad is super conservative. Think Bill O'Reilly. In fact, when he gets mad, the resemblance is downright eerie. Or should I say uncanny?
I'll go with eerily uncanny.
My dad is also 76 years old and lives several hundred miles away. I don't know how much longer he'll be around, or how much actual face to face contact I will have with him in that time.
I love my dad. He also drives me up the wall, especially when he starts spouting his views about...just about anything, really. Lately, when we've spent any time together, I've found myself saying. "Puppies, Dad! Let's talk about puppies! I like puppies. I think they are cute and a lot of fun! I know you like puppies too--let's talk about that!"
Dad loves his family, and he is a good person, in his way. He's also extremely bright, but somehow incapable of seeing how the political views he espouses not only hurt real human beings, but often hurt the human beings I KNOW THAT HE LOVES.
My dad is not my only conservative Facebook friend, but he is the one who, in some ways, poses the toughest challenge for me. Mind you, Facebook itself comes with its own special set of irritants. But for all of its faults, Facebook IS a handy way of kind of keeping up with family that I WANT to keep in touch with, but don't seem to find the time. And I can see pictures, see how big my cousins kids' are getting. Oh, and play Scrabble with my husband without having to tabulate the score manually. I now know all the 2 letter words that are legal, and words with a Q that don't require a U--generally I suck less at Scrabble than I used to, which will come in handy when visiting in-laws. (My husband refers to his mother as a "Scrabble shark".
The intersection of politics and Facebook is clearly a riskier one to navigate in this election year than it was last year or the year before. My personal solution to the problem has been to, as much as possible, keep my political views rather private in that particular space. Many of my friends are, to varying degrees, more politically vocal there, and I respect that decision.
You know what, though? This was supposed to be a comment, not a diary. How did I manage to stretch this out into a whole frickin' DIARY? I must be in some SERIOUS work-avoidance mode.
So, now I guess I can comment in response to my own diary, and say the one thing that sparked this whole thing in the first place...
