In the Beginning, I am told, God created man from a lump of clay — which may explain why men are prone to dirty thoughts.
Then, as an afterthought, He yanked out a rib from the man and created woman. I have no idea how that in any way explains the way that women are, but then who understands women anyway? Many have tried, but every time men think deeply about women, they get dirty thoughts. I blame God.
As a further afterthought — or maybe as a way to escape blame — God gave man and woman free will. “What could possibly go wrong?” I imagine He might have said.
I don’t know how long it took for Eve to unpackage her free will and get a hankering for forbidden fruit, but it happened soon enough. And then she urged Adam to take a bite, and—wanting to please her and blinded by dirty thoughts — he did.
Fast forward about a gajillion years, and mankind used free will to create Facebook and loaded it with algorithms that track any free will thought you might once have had, and then floods you with seductive stories, tales and lies until you are no longer capable of exercising your free will to think any other kind of thought. Thus was irony invented.
“What could possibly go wrong?” the Facebook gods must have asked.
Studies indicate that fully one-third of Americans get their news from Facebook. And that “news,” of course, has a big impact on what they believe or disbelieve to be true.
And now, I’m told, people who actually worked at Facebook are coming forward and confessing all the ways that company gets rich by creating falsehood-filled algorithms that make it virtually impossible to break away and believe anything other than whatever crazy conspiracy theory they’re selling. And because anger is the special sauce in that whole recipe, they feed your fury over anyone who might disagree with you.
For the record, I am not a Facebooker, or a Facebookite, or whatever it is that you Facebookonians call yourselves.
Well, that’s not entirely true, because I do have a Facebook account that I created five years ago, though I never check it. And it must still be active, because almost every day I get a text that tells me that James or Kim or Gloria is “a new Facebook friend suggestion.” Sometimes I’m told that I have as many as 12 new Facebook friend suggestions just waiting for me to invite them into my virtual life. It’s hell to be so popular.
My daughter helped me set up my Facebook page five years ago when my band, Old’s Cool, was scheduled to play at my 50th high school class reunion. “You haven’t heard from most of those people in a half-century,” she said. “If you had Facebook, you’d be able to catch up with them all the time, and they’d know when and where your band is playing. What could possibly go wrong?”
And so she helped me get connected the night before the reunion. I played there with my band, and the next day I fired up Facebook to see what was going on with them all.
I was stunned by what I saw. Here were old friends — many of whom seemed almost sane as kids — absolutely filled to the brim with vitriol, hate and political poison. It was as if Facebook required you to shed your decency and check it on a hook when you opened the door.
Oh, not everybody spewed poison on Facebook. Some just wanted you to give a thumbs up to the salad they ate yesterday, or the photo of their grandson having his first successful big boy boom-boom on the toilet.
To say I was horrified would be a world-class understatement. I shut it down and never opened it again.
“Oh, there’s lots of good stuff on it,” my daughter tells me. “And you can block or unfriend anything you don’t like.”
But she admits that it can be sort of a rabbit hole, sucking you deeper and deeper until you spend all your time on it. And some posts make you so mad, you have no recourse except to respond. So even if you don’t have to check your decency at the door, you pretty much end up leaving your free will behind on a hook.
So, I’m out.
No thank you, Facebook. Don’t bother telling me that Debbie or Mark or Carsten is “a new Facebook friend suggestion.” I won’t fall for it. I’m using my last little bit of free will to steer clear of you.
There may be a way to permanently delete my Facebook page, but I’m afraid to open the door even to do that. It would be like trying to become a virgin again, and I don’t think anyone other than Doris Day has ever managed to do that.
No, it’s better just to live with the shame of having given in to the temptation that one time five years ago, and then dedicate the rest of my life to cyber celibacy.
I’m sorry if I offended you by ending all this with a sexual metaphor, but it’s that whole dirty thoughts thing that started a gajillion years ago. Don’t blame me. Blame… well, you know.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
