A funny thing happened to me on the way to the forum...

A couple of childhood friends have accused me of shutting down the dialogue when people don’t agree with me. Apparently I got them all hot and bothered, then I flat-left them. I picked up my toys and went home. I grabbed my boa and flounced off.

“Why do you get so upset when people disagree with you?” they asked.

“I prefer an open forum,” they said, “where people listen to other opinions tolerantly.”


Yeah, me too, except that Facebook isn’t really an open forum. I’ve had people ignore my friend requests, or un-friend me, or fail to answer my messages, and I’m pretty damn sure that people who find me really annoying have hidden me from their feeds – just as I have hidden them. That’s the beauty of Facebook; you make what you want of it. You get what you get and you don’t get upset.

Now because my offended friends actually comment on my posts extremely rarely, I didn’t have them in mind when I posted that petition in favor of extending unemployment benefits, or that possibly-debunked-by-Snopes jpeg about how a 1950s housewife should stfu in the presence of her man. For the most part, only the usual suspects responded, and they responded in the usual way, and it was all good until the outside agitators showed up.

Frankly, I use Facebook to talk to like-minded people, most of whom I’ve met during the last twenty years. I had lost touch with the-two-who-are-now-mad-at-me a long time ago, although it was one of them who invited me to join Facebook, and in retrospect I’m glad she did. But maybe we knew back when we stopped talking that we weren’t the right friends for one another. We were young then, and now we’re not. People change and move on, and Facebook can't really fix that.

As for my mind being closed: yep, it is. I mean, it would be really difficult at this point for anyone to convince me that the rich will create jobs for the rest of us provided we don’t make them pay their taxes. It would be difficult to convince me that a woman should be submissive to her husband because that’s the only way a heterosexual couple can keep their marriage going. It would be difficult to convince me that most unemployed people are lazy and are somehow gaming the system; therefore everyone's benefits should be cut. (And just for good measure, it would be really, REALLY difficult to convince me that it’s okay for a parent to be forced to hold a fundraiser to get chemotherapy for their child -- something that is UNHEARD OF in “socialist” western Europe.)

These are some of the viewpoints I have been asked to listen to with an open mind. I can’t do it. I can’t do it because – well, because they’re ridiculous viewpoints – but also because I didn’t just wake up one morning in 2008 and decide, “hey! I guess I’m a liberal feminist now!” Rather, these are beliefs I’ve held since I began to study how the world works, probably at around age fourteen. I have read and studied and debated with some fairly bright people and I’ve found that I still agree with myself. That’s thirty years of liberal feminism, which has survived intact despite the best efforts of Reagan and Bush I and Bush II (or Chimpy McFuckface as my friend Steve calls him) and all their ilk.

So calling me out for closed-mindedness on Facebook probably won’t make a dent now. Sorry.

At a certain point, sitting back and listening to the other side means that nothing is getting done. Of late, it seems to me that only one side “listens” while the other side steamrolls right over them. I can’t necessarily tell the Democrats in Congress what to do (though God knows I’ve tried) but if I want to do a little steamrolling on my own Facebook page, I will. I’ll be all, “you know what? There is no point in going on about this so I’m gonna stop.” And you can unfriend me if that doesn’t suit you.