Monday, January 1, 2018

Time To Say Good-bye

New year, new ideas.  You will have noticed that things have slowed down considerably here at the Citizen of Oa.  Since Charlottesville, I have been less and less able to cope emotionally with the downturn our nation has taken.  So I am taking my leave of most social media.  I will continue to post here if I have something important that I need to say.  I will have a minimal presence on Facebook.  I will for all intents and purposes be abandoning my personal account there.  Unfortunately, my duties as secretary for our local choral group, the River City Singers, include some maintenance of our Facebook page.  This of course necessitates in turn that I be a member of Facebook.  I will no longer be posting to Instagram for the same reasons.  (Really, does anybody give a damn about my vacation snaps or how my pie turned out?  I barely care myself.)  And I rarely Twittered.  I follow a few people of like mind, and have a blistering total of fewer than 20 followers myself.  Not a big footprint there, and no great loss to the world when I leave.  Again, I must preserve my accounts there until such time as our non-profit community chorus has actual money, and a real board of directors, and a proper secretary/director of public relations who can do a proper job in all of those places in support of our fledgling organization.

Parts of my Facebook experience have been immensely enjoyable.  I daresay I will miss searching for new images of vintage horror movie posters during the month of October.  This may be something I will continue to do here.  I have thoroughly enjoyed the ability to reconnect with so many long-lost friends from University, and from X-Philes Anonymous.  You folks in the XPA especially have no idea how much your friendship means to me, and how many times that friendship has, quite literally, saved my life.  I love all of you more than you know, and more than I deserve.

I simply can't take the toxicity of social media any more.  I can't take the stupidity, and I have come to accept that nothing I say will ever sway anyone from the Other Side to a more reasonable point of view, any more than I could ever be swayed myself to support the Cheeto-in-Chief in anything, ever.  The intensity of emotion and the heretofore unexperienced levels of actual hate that have become part of my life have to go away.  [EDITED 1/3/18:  I am not kidding here.  I had no love for some of the previous Republican administrations, Geroge W. in particular, because I believe in my heart that his victory in the 2000 election was achieved fraudulently; that the Supreme Court made the wrong decision when it ruled in his favor; that Gore caved in too quickly for the so-called good of the country, a crime of which Democrats and Liberals are guilty all too often.  But my emotions for the current administration include a deep and visceral hatred, truly.  It's doing me personal harm, on several levels, and the only way I can see forward to fight intelligently is to remove myself from the triggers.  Which probably means I will miss altogether the Tweet that starts World War III, but there you go.]

Those of you who have a similar frame of mind, continue to resist.  I am giving up on the internet, but not the resistance.  I will not stop fighting and struggling and resisting and giving my time, talent and treasure to the removal of the current monsters who think they are running things.  The winds will shift, and I will see it and help it to come about if I can.  But not on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.  From here on out, I'm doing my talking in the real world.

Love you all.  All done.  Bye-bye.