I Could Stick My Head in the Sand

THANK GOODNESS it’s Easter, and Lent has concluded, and you’re back to eating chocolate or drinking wine, or finally stopped trying to meditate a half hour each night and just ended up noticing places that need dusting. But it’s still February for me, and I’m only on Day 10 of giving up Facebook.

So far, I’m 0 for 10. I can’t even do one in a row.

I didn’t commit to giving up Facebook altogether. One can go only so long without pictures of friends’ newborns or reposting that video of a hamster doing backward somersaults ... SO ADORABLE! But I had prayerfully pledged to stop making political comments online. And stop sharing elucidating articles from The New York Times, and stop forwarding snarky memes, and stop raging against demonstrable falsehoods posted by the angry and the prejudiced, specifically my relatives south of the Mason-Nixon Line. (How did these people get a computer!? Did they pass a background check first?)

Stopping Facebook cold turkey was the only remedy for a truth junkie like me. Because I was overdosing on outrage. The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but sometimes it needs to pull over, roll down the window, and shout, “Hey, Neanderthals, read a book!”

My addiction started out harmlessly enough with, you know, peer pressure. My friends were doing it—fighting the good fight for truth on the internet—and with my legendary skills as a writer person who can do, like, grammar stuff, I could be another righteous warrior in a world gone mad.

But it was making me mad, and I desperately needed to stop, for at least 40 days, as well as 40 nights. (I briefly smelled a Lenten loophole that would leave my evenings free to rant, but I couldn’t confirm it on Google.)

I figured Lent would be the perfect time to give up Facebook, since while using it I had already given up good manners, civility, empathy, patience, forgiveness, and other things that should have been in the Boy Scout Law but weren’t because they had to make room for “clean” and “thrifty.” “Brave” I could do; you have to be brave to wade into the fray with Christian primitives who believe an assault rifle is their God-given right. They have rights, to be sure, such as the right to remain silent. But I needed a cooling off period before I could resume my purifying crusade for truth, and then watch that hamster video again. ( So adorable!)

I STARTED out this year calm enough, maintaining a hopeful perspective on our nation’s politics, trying not to fear the worst (and savoring each guilty plea and incrimination that came to light), while patiently waiting for Robert Mueller to drop the other shoe. Fortunately, he appears to have lots of shoes.

But my calm didn’t last. At a time when the scariest words in the English language are “The president is awake,” I was daily quivering with angst over his latest utterance, causing my head to ache, my coffee to spill, and my cellphone to periodically leap into the toilet. (Yes, I’m blaming that on the president, and no, I shouldn’t be on Facebook in the bathroom.)

People say don’t pay attention to Donald Trump’s tweets, but for me it’s an act of self-defense. His frequent diatribes challenging the rule of law are bad enough. But his rants against nuclear-armed nations frighten me to the core.

I have to pay attention, so I can protect my family. Should I gather them in the basement, which I’ve been meaning to stock with water and canned goods but instead left crowded with bicycles and boxes filled with stuffed animals and old term papers? (None of which are edible without LOTS of hot sauce.) They’re nothing like the supplies stocked in the fallout shelters of my youth, whose owners became the envy of the neighborhood with their sealed underground bunkers and metal doors labeled “Family Only.” A pointless exercise, of course, since scholars predict that post-nuclear life on earth would consist mainly of insects and grass. (Having recently eaten a grasshopper taco, I can personally attest to the durability of that life form. I was still chewing it on the way home.)

Actually, we might need the basement more for hiding from relatives whose false pieties I have railed against on Facebook. But not to worry. Their attention span lasts only until the next post from a Russian troll. (“Liberals deny that the Bible supports assault rifles!”)

And then maybe we’d hear a knock on the basement door, and it would be Robert Mueller, his outstretched hands offering us blankets, fresh water, and some more high-protein grasshopper jerky. (We would have run out of our supply but still be chewing on the last batch.)