Dear Ms. Plume,
How can I get people to stop sending me political texts, emails, and posting things on my Facebook page? How can I say it more concisely than, “Think what you want, let me think what I want; aggressively bullying me and assaulting me with your position isn’t going to change mine.”? Egads! Enough already!
Sandy
Dear Sandy
Delete, delete, delete.
I don’t think anyone’s ever going to change someone’s political beliefs with a Facebook post; the most they are likely to do is change someone’s opinion of them. Many of us were brought up to not discuss politics, sex, or religion in public, and Facebook certainly is public. When I was discussing this question with one of my advisors this morning, we agreed that posting sexual escapades would be more welcome and interesting than political views. So come on all of you political posters out there – take the challenge and at least give the rest of us something to laugh about! Your sex life has to be more interesting to us than your political opinion, because we already know about that. We heard you the first time.
L. A. Plume
Dear L. A. Plume,
What is going on these days? Friends are posting things on Facebook telling people if they don’t agree with them they can’t be friends. Friends are getting angry with each other and hanging it out on the social media laundry line. What happened to the concept that we are all entitled to our own opinions and should respect the opinions and beliefs of others? What happened to sitting down and talking things through? Do we all have to like vanilla? Do we all have to use our thumbs instead of our tongues? Where are our words?
Confused
Dear Confused,
Texts and social media postings are the quickest way, as you know, to get information out there to lots of people at once. Perhaps it becomes a habit to just dash off a text, and it’s convenient at times, but letters on a screen can never take the place of words spoken with inflection, and accompanying body language that tells the bigger story. I can’t help you here. There are more questions than there are answers.
Certainly more misunderstandings can occur – under any circumstances – when the people aren’t willing to sit down face to face and have a real conversation.
L. A. Plume
Dear L. A. Plume,
I would like to say that all this blasting of political views on Facebook is just tiresome. This is social media. There should be fun stuff going on – not someone’s political view, which I don’t give a fig about anyway. I don’t get it. Tonight a good friend, who should know better, posted a dig at one of the candidates. I almost broke my cardinal rule and told her that was beneath her; I was surprised she’d stooped so low. I didn’t say anything, but my stock in her judgment went down. Is there any remedy?
Missing the Point
Dear Missing,
Not that I can find. Your choices are the same on social media as they are in life – you can only control what you can, which in this case means to not look at social media, hide all the people who post things that annoy you until after the election, or keep posting happy things for those of us who feel the same way and let the others fight it out amongst themselves. If there is one person out there who has hopped over the political line because of a post on social media, please let us know; then we’ll ask for two.
And by the way, for those of you who are avid political posters, none of this means the rest of us don’t care as much as you do about our candidate or our country. We just choose to express ourselves in less obvious, and perhaps more effective, ways.
L. A. Plume
