Defriended

I had to defriend someone on Facebook yesterday. I had been thinking about it for awhile, because it was increasingly apparent that this person and my political beliefs were divergent. I don't hide that I am a liberal. I couldn't wait for George W. Bush to get out of office. But I never wrote or said anywhere that I wished his parents had aborted him, which is what the person that I just defriended on Facebook wrote about Obama.

I found this person's assertion that they were a right-wing, pro-life Christian to be distinctly at odds with their professed wishes. And abruptly my decision was made. I defriended as soon as I got home and don't feel any guilt about it at all.

Today I was reading an article by local columnist Connie Shultz. She wrote about a long-married couple who had recieved over the years a number of political emails from their friends and family that they didn't agree with. This couple liked their friends and understood that they didn't necessarily have to agree with everyone's political beliefs to continue liking them so they deleted. That is, until the day they recieved a vitriolic letter forwarded from their best friends claiming that Obama was scary because the original letter writer knew nothing about him, from where he got the money to put himself through an Ivy League law school to how he supported his upscale lifestyle. The letter went on to say that Obama was barely an American.

The couple were taken aback by this brutal letter and stewed about it for days before finally asking their buddies to not email them stuff like that anymore. The other couple wouldn't talk to them for months before they finally admitted that their feelings had been hurt. But how did they think their friends felt?!

Shultz suggested in her column that should anyone ever recieve an email from a friend who they continued to want to be friends with despite a schism in political ideology that they should email a link to her article http://www.cleveland.com/schultz/index.ssf/2010/03/handling_those_partisan_hate_e.html, which ends with

"Hey.

That awful e-mail you sent?

Please don't do that again.

Hopefully yours,

A fellow American."



However, if you don't want to be friends with them ever again, go ahead and defriend those assholes on Facebook. I won't judge you.