Goodbye Facebook--Hello Reality

I finally pushed delete this week. I thought about it for over two years and tried several times and failed because I am not the most technologically savvy grandmother on the block. However, spurred on by an anger I thought I had left for dust, I finally figured it out and pushed delete— the relief was immediate.

So, why was I so angry?

I have always and forever been a letter writer, a consummate communicator that not only loved to write and share all manner of things with family and friends, but even more, I relished the time someone might give back by keeping me personally informed about their own lives. It was something I cherished, but alas, no longer exists.

I have been on a diet for too long, my family and friendships feel too skinny, too mass manufactured, too mass consumed, there is no intimacy left. To put it bluntly, I feel like I have been participating in a free-for-all orgy. I am sick of being fed advertisements for or against Jesus, Obama, climate change, oil production, spirituality, right and left politics, and then, for the positive I get to consume with the rest of the world at my table family and friends’ gatherings I can only cannibalize from such a great distance. I am stuffed! And, I am terribly disappointed that not one of you has enough time to write a simple letter that only has to be electronically delivered to New Zealand, as one friend or family member to another.

The reality is…my dismissal of Facebook will probably not make one little difference in the ‘free for all’ conversation ‘you all’ hold with one another, describing what you might want for breakfast, lamenting the nightly news in unison whilst posting regurgitated slogans that you picked up somewhere else on the net and plaster all over your walls to show your dismal preferences and allegiances to something or someone besides your own precious words and thoughts…but, I will rest easier knowing I had the guts to send ‘you all’ off with the punch of a single button—delete.

Delete is the new form of non-violent resistance.

But, if any one of you decides that you might still desire to be a part of my life—all it takes is a phone call or an e-mail, or a response to my Blog with enough of YOU in it for me to respond to, and I think all of you who know me, knows this, I will respond. But, if you send me a Forward, be prepared to talk to the screen, or perhaps better, you can Facebook it for the rest of the minions, because I am completely over the whole mass manufactured way of communicating and I am not participating anymore.