I Removed Some Friends Today

I really didn’t want to do it, it was an unpleasant event for me today and I even questioned myself for doing it but today I removed some friends who were promoting gay rights on their Facebook pages. I think it must be a special day or week in the Unite States and as I don’t live there I’m unaware of the specifics of this reason for promotion. I went so far as to do a cursory search on Google to see if there was a gay pride week or some bill being put through congress and in my brief search came up with nothing conclusive. Anyway, I don’t know which side of the whole Same Sex Marriage debate you come down on, and I believe you have the right to your own opinion in the United States, you even have the right to promote your own opinion. Like most everything it takes a good PR department and a slew of lawyers to help any movement make it from the absurd and marginalized, what homosexuality was thirty years ago, to the accepted, what homosexuality seems to be in the U.S. today. I also know that many people, much smarter than I , have weighed in on this topic ad nauseum. It is not my intention to correct the masses on the internet. I imagine there are many with my exact same views and many who have published their editorial remarks with much clearer acumen.

My purpose in writing this is to give a clear reason for my particular actions on Facebook today. I doubt most of the friends I had will even notice that I removed them from my friend list, but if they do notice and are somehow following my blog then they’ll have someplace to go for an answer. I do not hate or believe that these people are no longer my friends. Most of them are people I had pleasant acquaintance with more than 20 years ago. I now enjoy for the sake of nostalgia seeing pictures of them and their children on Facebook. There is something to be said about having a wide pool of friends on Facebook - your pool of interesting factoids, shared links, cute photos, witty status updates and social news can be much richer for the wide variety. But, unless I’m posting a like or a comment, I probably wouldn’t bother to try and correct the thinking of one of these people. Not because I don’t care about them but because I believe that if I were to try to say anything in this medium to these people it would only come across as judgmental and condescending. I do believe that a true friend should be able to speak their mind and share their feelings about such things in a way that would not come across this way but, as you may all know, Facebook doesn’t breed true friendship it breeds a following and a platform for those who are networking savvy.

Since my knowledge for the last 10 years has only been as a result of these “friends’” Facebook pages, and I find myself limited in being able to respond to such public postings I feel myself required to remove them from my friending. This does not mean that I bear them ill will or that they have no place in my life. I would love to meet them again some day and see what has transpired in the decades that have passed, but I imagine I will not see them again. This is disappointing to me because it was not simply that my now lost friends think Gay Marriage is right that I unfriended them but because they felt it necessary to promote such a thing with internet memes and profile photo support thus promoting to me their beliefs on my news feed.

I know I could easily remove their news stories from my newsfeed and continue to have them as silent friends I visit when I begin to feel the pangs of nostalgia, but in the case of these friends I would have never thought to look at their pages if it weren’t for my news feed. So, my friendship with them exists merely as a way for them to promote what is important in their life. The things that stood out today was that they had joined the masses and begun promoting Same Sex Marriage.

As my writing is beginning to take turn in the direction of babble and not meaningful writing I am going to steer back to what I believe to be the main issue. Our generation is severely tied to consensus, if there is not consensus we feel so uncomfortable that we must ostracize those who are causing the incongruity in our unanimous voting. Think about the ideas and inventions that have spurred this generation towards a consensus based life:

1. Everything related to mass media has allowed education to no longer be locally determined but rather large networks determine the propaganda we are fed on a national and sometimes international level.
2. The Internet and social networking have allowed movements to quickly and efficiently draw up sides and promote their viewpoints.
3. Censorship is required to deal with an overabundant source of content now available to the public through the internet.
4. Universities, give lip service to diversity while promoting a very specific World View
5. If your World View does not match that of the majority tech savvy enough to have a online presence then you seem to have lost the promotional battle.

I’m not saying that any of these behaviors are evil but they do promote an atmosphere where consensus or ridicule are the only obvious options. Well I’m not afraid of ridicule, that is one thing that in several arenas I’ve been trained not to fear. I learned the hard way living always the outsider in many countries around the world. Some countries have gone so far as to remove access to unwanted, censored, material for their citizens. China and Turkey are two countries that come readily to mind while I’m sure many more could populate the list. I believe that some censoring is needed and am thankful for countries that attempt to promote a moral code rather than a code of consensus that has such meager standards as more than 50% wins the argument.

Our legal system would not let someone be put to death unless the voting was unanimous, and with good reason. If consensus can’t be had why risk making a wrong decision? But in the social arena in the public opinion poles we can cast our votes willy-nilly without a thought of the outcome and without any solid foundation for our argument. We make snap decisions about what feels right and believe ourselves above reproach if public opinion favors our opinion. Unfortunately this phenomenon is true for conservatives with regard to the law and liberals alike.

There’s a reason that the battle for same sex marriage is being fought in the social arena instead of the legal one. The social arena is not a place of fact but rather a place of consensus. If you can get a majority to agree then you’re close enough to consensus to promote your idea as fact. Fortunately we have not yet changed our legal system to match our information and promotional platform, but we are not far from it. When we do change our system from a unanimous vote to a vote just above the average then facts will no longer matter, and the minority however right they may or may not be will be oppressed. Presently Gay Rights Activists claim they are being oppressed by law, and they are oppressed, but not by human law. Homosexuals are oppressed by natural law:

1. The marriage or legal sexual pairing of two life partners of the same gender will produce no offspring. What court can change that?
2. The marriage or legal sexual paring of two live partners of opposite gender in many cases will produce offspring. What court can change that?

Some may argue this an egregious inequality, but science and nature show little interest in the concepts of equality - interdependence maybe but equality certainly is not a natural concept. If it was we would not have gender or race, countries or ethnicities, economic strata or regional resources. Consensus and Equality are myths, and although we’d like to believe that they exist we’d be better off learning to cope, admit to, and accept the inequality. Once we can accept that life is unfair, then possibly we can provide the proper benefits needed for those of any class, creed or sexual inclination. The purpose of law is to protect the weak from the sins of the strong, one cannot promote that kind of law without suffering the debilitating effects of self-limitation.

The true power for change comes not in your ability to overcome the law with your ideas by way of consensus but to exemplify, if possible, the ironic negative outcomes of a life lived completely by the law. The only way to prove a system doesn’t work is to completely give yourself to it. Unfortunately, no one is ready to give up their ego to fail miserably, and only one source could possibly be trustworthy enough to impose a global law. I wonder who that could be?

Then the question would be, “who has the right to interpret that law?” Well, I’ll deal with that question at a later time. For now I have to succumb to the physical laws on my body which require me to rest my eyes for eight hours in a 24 hour period. I hope you have found as little as possible to take offense at in this article but since I believe that consensus and equality of thought are improbable in this world I’m sure someone will take great offense and others will take no offense, it’s an inevitability. Until next time -

Accept your inequality and learn to protect those who are on the low end of the rights and freedoms spectrum by sacrificing your own freedoms rather than trying to amass your strength so you can take the freedoms of others and give it to those lacking. Robin hood was not righteous because he was strong he was righteous because he remained poor. So I must be poor in friends if I am to continue to believe what I believe.