Deleting people

Picking up where we left off, even though I am trying to focus on staying connected to people, I ended two connections last week. I unfriended one person and I blocked another.

I don't take that lightly. I know people who go on unfollow/unfriend sprees, and I have never felt a need for that. However, if their reason for doing so is that they have realized that too many updates from people they don't care about makes them miss updates from the people that they do care about, that would make a lot of sense, except that I am not comfortable blithely deciding that I don't care about a bunch of people.

Looking back, I think something helped with the one unfriend that I didn't realize at first.

The engagement started with a status update she had about needing to round up all of the mentally ill and drug addicts and get them off the streets.

I initially assumed it was related to Trump's recent interest in locking up mentally ill people as a way of ending mass shootings. Even if that were not blatantly cruel, it wouldn't work for that problem; most of the shooters aren't mentally ill.

She said it had nothing to do with Trump, so that was probably just a big coincidence. Maybe her real concern was ending homelessness, but not by fixing economic inequality or housing shortages.

There are reasons it is not an effective plan for that either, but the blatant cruelty was what really bothered me. I mean, someone who thinks that rounding up all mentally ill and addicted people will get them treated and happier and healthier, they are wrong, but at least their heart is in a decent place. I could not feel that way about this poster, especially seeing how she was responding to someone who uses weed for PTSD.

I supported his replies, but we didn't really get anywhere. Here's the funny part; that guy was one of the two people who was really abusive to me about Bernie Sanders, and unfriended me then. Obviously he had only unfriended me and not blocked me.

That's all fine; we were not particularly close and I didn't really have hard feelings over it. I was more concerned that the person I regularly socialized with was so readily abusive to me. I did end up unfriending her not long after the second time she tore into me, and later I ended up being really glad that I had already done so. That was the thing that helped.

In that case, this one friend was an anti-vaxxer. She would not use that term; she just doesn't believe that parents should have to abide by the science-backed school schedule or have to get all of the vaccines. Also it is not about autism or mercury or any of the other well-debunked things. It was discussions about vaccines that made me less surprised when she raged at me about Sanders. There had been some other indications of judginess, hypocrisy, and self-absorption, but that was the big one.

Anyway, back when new measles cases were being discovered every day, I wondered if she had changed her stance at all. Instead she had added a profile sticker about vaccine choice.

I felt so much more relaxed not being her friend.

That didn't make her philosophy less damaging to the community. Us no longer being friends did not reduce her capacity for harm to others, but it did eliminate the amount of stress that she caused me. I don't need any more stress.

So this other person wanting to lock up people... that is a harmful attitude. It was not the first time she had posted something like that. I bet she is anti-immigrant too. However, based on how that conversation went, I am not going to influence her. She is also not going to influence me. We could potentially really annoy each other, but does that help anyone?

In this case it was easy for me to decide to unfriend her because we were not really friends. We went to the same high school, but when I first saw the friend request I initially thought she was from my mission because I don't remember her at all.

That doesn't have to be a deal-breaker; there are people I don't remember or barely remember from then that I really like now. I don't remember her, and I am not finding her likable, and that made it almost easy to decide to say goodbye. Almost.

There was less indifference with the person I blocked, so that will be another story, and another look at consciously and ethically curating your social media interactions.