Last week, for the first time ever, I un-friended someone on Facebook. Some of you who follow me on social media may know this guy—his name is David and he’s someone I knew in college. When we lived across the hall from one another during our freshmen year, we had an almost constant debate running. He came from a theologically fundamentalist and politically ultraconservative home; theologically, my upbringing was in the Evangelical mainstream, and politically it was somewhere between solidly liberal and radically left-wing. Both David and I liked to debate (OK, argue) issues.
But here’s the problem. The reincarnation of our argumentative relationship was toxic online. I want my Facebook page to be a safe place and David’s brusk and sometimes bullying style made it unsafe. Still, it was hard to unfriend David. I don’t like the idea of discontinuing a relationship—even if it is an online relationship—and I want to be the kind of person who maintains friendships and sustains conversation with folks whose ideas I find offbeat, out of whack or even offensive. Our society is far too polarized and fragmented; I believe we should be moving toward one another and not away, even when we have disagreements.
So there’s my struggle: I want to be the kind of friend who relishes my connections to people who hold a variety of beliefs, but I also want my online community to feel safe. It’s an almost koan-like quandary. Perhaps I need to sit with it a while. Or, there’s this option: my Lenten discipline was to send postcards to old friends. It felt like a more authentic kind of communication and a more profound expression of friendship than is available on social media. Maybe I’ll send David a postcard.
What do you think?
Ben