Last Friday morning my kindergartener was home sick from school. Exhausted from being up with him for much of the night, and emotional from a rough and trying week, I sat at the dining room table trying to work as tears slipped down my face and splashed onto my laptop keyboard.
“Why are you crying, mom?” He asked.
I didn’t have an answer for him. Not one that he could understand.
You see, I was crying because of Facebook. In particular a rancorous political exchange with immediate family members over something I’d posted on Facebook which to me seemed, at the time, not so controversial.
But these days, everything is a potential flash point.
So I was crying.
Because I am a website editor who manages a Facebook page for a living, full time, being on Facebook for me is an occupational hazard. And even if I am not posting “controversial” things about politics, I am seeing them, and seeing the fighting and the meanness, all the time. Everywhere. It’s unavoidable, and it’s led me to take rather large Facebook breaks on the weekends.
As I sat there in a silly, teary mess that morning, a thought hit me like a lightning bolt. I remembered a Facebook post I saw on Inauguration Day, among the vitriol and the rants, the jubilation and the gloating, that reminded me that I really should not be crying over politics on Facebook.
