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I said goodbye to some old friends in the past few days.<\/p>\nI said goodbye to some old friends in the past few days.<\/p>\n
By \u201cfriends\u201d I mean they were friends on Facebook. And by \u201csaid goodbye,\u201d I mean I just hit the “unfriend” button and moved on. No explanation needed, although in the unfriending process, the explanation becomes invisible anyway.<\/p>\n
I only joined Facebook reluctantly several years ago, when my high school graduating class was planning a reunion. By joining, I was instantly reconnected with a lot of folks from my past. Some were dear friends I hadn\u2019t talked to in years. Some were people I barely knew, but that was cool. Many reminded me of why I had moved on with my life and not looked back much in the first place.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, I didn\u2019t even go to that reunion. I haven\u2019t been back to my home town in over ten years, in fact. Hmmm.<\/p>\n
It seems that after looking at their posts and seeing their photos and arguing over things both petty and important, I saw the need to begin culling some of them from the list. It\u2019s a wonder more of them didn\u2019t unfriend me first. I can be somewhat\u2026 abrasive, I\u2019ll admit. But in getting to know them again, it became obvious\u2026 They had changed. I had changed, too. After while, I hate to say it, it became too much work to hang onto what was left of the strings that once tied us together. It\u2019s nothing personal. But I have things I need to do and so do they. It\u2019s okay to move on.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, some of them turned out be kindred spirits in ways I never would have imagined, and I came to regret not knowing them better along the way. That’s been fun.<\/p>\n
The election of 2008 happened just before I jumped on the Faceblogs. But by the time the election of 2012 rolled around, it brought irreconcilable differences to light. Major friendship test right there. And yet, I stayed friends with a lot of people who voted differently from me, who believed differently from me, because at least they weren\u2019t gloating tools about it.<\/p>\n
Sadly, the election of 2016 was the last straw. After eight years of putting up with the unrelenting barbs against what I believed in, I did some final fine tuning. I unfriended a lot of folks during the primaries for both parties (and several dispatched with me as well). And as election day approached, I could not believe what some of these folks were posting (and vice versa, I\u2019m sure). The day after the election was sheer carnage. But today, as the orange one was officially sworn in, I could not take it any more. I thought the purge was complete from both ends. I tried to stay off the Faceblogs. And yet\u2026 there were arguments. There were people telling me to get over it, people telling me to ignore all that animosity towards the last president, people telling me to suck it up and be nice.<\/p>\n
Nope, sorry, that’s too big a fence to mend at the moment. Might even be a border wall, if you think about it.<\/p>\n
I can have respectful conversations with people if that respect goes both ways. But more and more, that\u2019s not been the case. (And again, I must reiterate, I have become less tolerant of those who are not tolerant of my tolerances. Sorry.) If I ever see some of these folks again in the real world, maybe we\u2019ll sit down and talk. Maybe we’ll laugh at old times. We can still be friends in real life. But I don\u2019t want to be friends with your online persona. I don\u2019t want to see your unresearched memes or your links to parts of the web that make my skin crawl.<\/p>\n
Just because we have a history doesn\u2019t mean we need to have a present. Or a future. It\u2019s nothing personal. Maybe we’ll be friends again. Or at least \u201cfriends.\u201d Dunno. (\u201cShrug\u201d emoticon.)<\/p>\n
This is where I get off. This is where I leave you. You know how to reach me, but do you know how to reach out to me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I said goodbye to some old friends in the past few days. By \u201cfriends\u201d I mean they were friends on Facebook. And by \u201csaid goodbye,\u201d I mean I just hit the “unfriend” button and moved on. No explanation needed, although in the unfriending process, the explanation becomes invisible anyway. I only joined Facebook reluctantly several … Continue reading “Goodbye to Some of My “Friends””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2],"tags":[19,10],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-rants","tag-manifesto","tag-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162,"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions\/162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ronruelle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}