About a day ago, give or take a few hours, I posted a rather dramatic appeal for moral support. It went like this:
Someone please reassure me that the words people say on Facebook are just words, and are not ever translated into deeds or actions.
I need external reassurance, because I have been trying to reassure myself for 48 hours and I’m not there yet. My stomach hurts. It has been hurting for 48 hours. I want it to stop. I know part of this is me overreacting. But part of it is other people overreacting. Except when I overreact I get a sour stomach and want to crawl in a hole and die. Others have very different ways of overreacting.
#goingtoworktomorrowwillbethebravestthingidoallyear
A little overly dramatic. Okay, a lot overly dramatic. But I was kind of shook up from seeing two days or so worth of vicious comments on one of the Facebook pages our company operates. That it happened to be the one for KCOW Radio, which I spend a lot of time on doing programming-related promotion work, made it all the more upsetting. We have three other Facebook pages and I have no problem keeping my eyes away from those. But KCOW is my baby. And it’s hard to watch people say horrible things about your baby. (It’s also horrible to realize that you’re 48 years old, unattached and can point only to your job as a point of pride. But one problem at a time.)
The comments were in regard to some Associated Press wire stories, but I don’t want to get into specifics. It doesn’t matter to me what these articles were about. The reaction is the thing. Suffice to say that if you disagree with a news story, a great way to express that is “I disagree,” or “You got that wrong”, or “This story is skewed”, or the like. A troubling way to express your disagreement is to cite employees by name and suggest they move out of town; suggest that a radio station in rural Nebraska is destroying America; declare that the people who built the radio station in 1949 would be ashamed of its current operation; and on, and on, and on.
I have written three or four stories on this little blog about the toxicity of social media. And yet it still exists! Color me shocked. Okay, not really. But what is wrong with people? How can they behave this way and find peace with their actions? Do they think Facebook comments are read by a droid and not by real human beings?
Beats me.
But I feel good about the people I have in my little Facebook world. I have been getting a constant stream of encouraging thoughts since the moment I posted my freakout last evening. Longtime friends…from community college, Santa’s Workshop, college, community theater. Friends in the radio business…my brother, my sister, a few Aunts…dear friends I have made over 22 years in Alliance. And a former Fearless Leader via telephone. Your words of positivity (and in some cases well-placed “tough love”) mean more than you will ever know.
So what have I learned? I dunno if I learned anything. I learned “don’t read the comments”. But I knew that before. This should not be a surprise. Many years ago I learned “don’t drink a Coke right before bed” but I do that sometimes too.
I guess what galls me is that these people swearing, fighting, threatening on Facebook are not like any single person I have ever met in person in Alliance, Nebraska. Oh sure, I’ve taken a crank call and I’ve even gotten a snotty letter in the mail once every 10 or 15 years. But these were noteworthy exceptions. On Facebook, tact and human decency are the noteworthy exceptions.
But this makes me wonder: Who’s the real person? The one throwing up fists on Facebook or the one waving hi at the supermarket? (It’s a legitimate question because I’ve experienced both sides of the same coin.)
The lesson for me, though, again just to recap: Don’t read the comments. They just get to me too much. I guess that makes me an empath or (let’s be frank) an enormous wussy baby. But I’d rather be a wussy baby without the sour stomach.
Ignorance is bliss. My stomach will thank me. (The same actually goes for not drinking a Coke just before bed.)