Inflammation of Facebook

I'm sad to say I usually check my email and Facebook while waiting for my coffee to finish brewing. As with so many days, Facebook is full of thoughts, experiences, good and bad news....and lately, inflammatory links.

I enjoy seeing the different beliefs, ideals and thoughts of my friends on Facebook, whether through links, posts, shared blogs, and so on. I have also hidden so many friends over the last year because I can't handle seeing the constant barrage of malicious diatribes, inciting headlines and in your face political beliefs. Now don't get me wrong - freedom of speech is a great gift and one that we should all take advantage of, considering how many issues there are facing our country at the moment.

But I don't believe that freedom of speech gives us the right to be rude, condescending or downright mean-spirited toward one another. People couch it in terms of it's their religious or political beliefs, that they are entitled to say what they want, that they are just being "honest". That honest one is the biggest cop-out. It allows a person to say the cruelest statements and then say "I'm just being honest". If we all honestly said what we thought at all times we would all be friendless.

I don't think that everyone has to think the way I do, believe the same things I do when it comes to faith, or feel the same politically. I do believe that we should be courteous to one another as human beings. What happened to discourse without people sinking into the mud? What happened to having a discussion without accusations being thrown around like confetti? We will all feel strongly about what we believe, feel, think regarding situations. When did we as a society lose the ability to hear one another? When did we decide to compartmentalize people, politics, faiths and viewpoints into small boxes that don't allow us to stretch? When did we become a country that allows our media to tell us what we ought to believe?

What brought on this post was, in my opinon, an unnecessarily inflaming link on Facebook. It used race as a way of making the headline more shocking, more in your face. Is race an issue in our country? Are the inequalities that minority or non-caucasian races face in this country an issue? Absolutely. Is anything gained by making words like white, black, latino, hispanic, asian, african-american, caucasian more imbued with bitterness, hate, fear, superiority, inferiority?

I am just an audiologist who lives in a pretty calm city in the south. I don't pretend to have a solution to the issues that face us in daily life at this moment in our country's history. There are inequalities. There are injustices. There are major shifts regarding injustice and inequality that need to happen. Does that change and shift start with our daily conversations and allowing one another to be heard, to discuss, to allow that we are not always right?

All I know is that fear and hate mongering do not solve these issues from either side. They divide us from one another, from the ability to work toward a solution. Words are powerful and should be used to spur us on to productive action that will resolve issues, not continue to make these issues more mired in controversy, resentment and fear.