The Nine-Month Itch

The honeymoon is over.

Social media has become my nagging wife. I’ve been married to the lovely Brigita for over twenty-five years and not once has it ever occurred to me to try and uninstall or unfriend her. But, my nine-month, whirlwind romance with Facebook and Twitter has transformed into a daily sludge through the mud pit.

I started this relationship, in part, as a way to build an audience for this blog. Quickly, I found over a hundred followers on Twitter and over four hundred friends on Facebook and I told my wife (my human wife), “I’ve never been this popular before!” The promise of catching up with long-lost friends and finding out the on-the-fly opinions of so many people kept the well of writing ideas from drying up. I wrote about my wonderfully weird friends, my love of two countries and my harrowing Army experiences. I wrote about politics, religion, cuisine, science and technology and social media was to thank for that.

But, as time skipped along, I noticed something insidious in many of the feeds and posts:

People lie.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

• Sarah Palin said that Native Americans should leave America and go back to Nativia.
• Jade Helm 15 was a presidential-sanctioned military exercise meant to institute martial law in Texas

- Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders saved a dog from a burning building.

- Martin Luther is back from the dead and working for Herman’s Neutics.

As you can see, the internet’s nose has grown to epic lengths. But, it doesn’t stop with deception. Facebook has gotten mean. Liberals fight with conservatives; whites fight with blacks; LGBT fights with traditional marriage folk; lovers of the New Horizons space probe (the Pluto picture-taking spacecraft) fight with me. Dark has the internet-o-sphere become.

So, I thought about getting a divorce. Shut down the Facebook, tweet my last tweet and consider isolated living in the Canadian forests where I can grow a beard, sell beaver pelts for a living and write about the evils of modern technology on the backs of large strips of maple tree bark.

But Jesus tells me that that kind of attitude may increase my crustiness, but it would diminish my saltiness:

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” — Matthew 5:13

Since I am not particularly fond of the idea of being trampled underfoot by the Son of God, I guess I’m just going to have to find a way to make this marriage work.

Helpful Tips If You Are Married to Social Media:

• Time away from your spouse is a healthy thing. Take a staycation in an un-electronic corner of your house with a book (that dusty thing on your shelf with paper in the middle of it) or grab the fishing pole so you can get crusty over the lack of fish in the pond.
• Talk to your spouse with kind, understanding words. When he/she spouts off about how the world will end in two weeks or how that dumb dress isn’t blue at all, smile and nod and politely tell her that her brain has turned to cottage cheese.

• Consider professional counseling to resolve your differences. You will find a surprisingly large number of shrinks who will be happy to take your money to let you talk incessantly about how everything on the internet relates to WWF Superstar John Cena.
• Finally, if all else fails, consider the overused adage: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” In other words, YOU be the one who spreads ridiculous lies or inane rants about Trump’s hair or campaigns to help Creflo Dollar get a jet or…anyway, you get the idea.

No, not really. I suppose my real concluding thought is this: in the din of Caitlyn-bashing, Trump talk and the deification of Chuck Norris, I like to think there is a voice of wisdom inside each one of us. The only way to drown out the dumb is let reason cry louder. So, I will stay with my cymbal-clanging wife and attempt to teach her what I know and trust that her voice will sing sweeter one day.