By T.W. Burger
I figured out a solution to too many nights trying to calm down my deep anger and despair over lots of issues I have tried to combat on Social Media.
Very soon, I will be laying off a lot of my social media contacts. “Laid off” here means “firing.”
I mean here mostly Facebook. I’ve got about 1400 “friends,” using the term in its widest sense, on the service. Yes, I am a fairly sociable kind of guy, interested in all sorts of people. I am also a journalist (a real one,) and FB has been a fascinating place from which to keep a watch on the different ways different people react to stuff. Many of the contacts are people I have interviewed for various stories, on everything from the popularity of tattoos to abortion rights...Both sides of the latter. The contacts include radicals, peaceniks, rabid adherents to damned near any side of any argument...the list seems endless.
But, officially, I’m retired now. I’m tired of most of them. Really tired. And since an admonition to “shut the f—k up,” seems unlikely to be effective, I’ll simply throw you out of my tent.
You won’t be missed.
Don’t be misled. I’m not pulling my head into my shell. I have plenty of people who hold social and political views that I find abhorrent, and they should just lean back and have another Milwaukee’s Best beer, because they are really my friends, DESPITE their politics. I’m old school, from a time long ago when you could disagree all night over a political issue, and still stand together in a bar fight.
The rest of you were in the collection mostly as oddities, like bugs in a natural history museum, and you can go to hell in your own handbasket.
As I said: I’m retired and not covering anything aside from the upholstery. I have enough stress and misery dealing with the current fast rot of our country without having to wallow among those who are causing it.
See yah. Or, rather, not.
T.W. Burger was raised in Athens. He graduated from Athens High School in 1967. He worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks and concrete mixers, has been an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant.
He has been a newspaper reporter since 1985, mostly in Gettysburg, PA, with various stints at other publications. Semi-retired, he is still working as a freelance writer and lives on the banks of Marsh Creek just outside of Gettysburg.
He is the author of "The Year of the Moon Goose" is currently writing “Never Met a Stranger.”