Facebook ‘friend’ spoils online sermon with remarks
Our church tried something different a few Sundays ago.
Our online service featured a sermon by a local Black pastor, who used a Monopoly board and a lot of history to help our mostly white congregation better understand systemic racism and the ways it still affects our society.
It was a wonderful opportunity for us to hear a perspective different than our own experiences. But …
We are encouraged to share the services, which we watch on Facebook, and I did it that morning.
Suddenly, someone with a fake screen name began commenting very negatively through the chat function on what he was seeing and hearing. Despite the best efforts of numerous church members who asked him to stop his stream of negative commentary, he persisted, angrier and angrier, even to the point of profanity, disparaging the message and the messenger.
He didn’t want to hear it — and he didn’t want anyone else to hear it either.
It was incredibly bad manners, not to mention bad citizenship. As gratified as I was by the respectful tone of my fellow church members as they asked him to stop disrupting the virtual service, I found myself distracted from the important message.
Afterward, the guy confirmed what I had feared: He was one of my almost 5,000 Facebook “friends,” and I had been responsible for drawing him to our service. He sent me a Facebook message asking me to Unfriend him, because he couldn’t figure out how to do it.
“Gladly,” I responded.
Reflecting on this now, I find myself thinking that, in a way, it exemplifies what life has been like for all of us, particularly as this ugly political campaign intensifies, but really for the
last four years.
The noise of daily, sometimes hourly, craziness makes it difficult to focus on things that really matter. It has made rational discussion of many social and political issues almost impossible, as we saw again in the first presidential debate and see every day on the battleground of Facebook.
One of the responses to my call for people’s Pet Peeves — keep them coming, by the way, because there are more columns coming — was a long rant about “face diapers” in which the writer invoked the Founding Fathers and D-Day, among others.
“230 years of bloodshed and lives lost to defend liberty and freedom
have been flushed down the drain without ONE shot fired,” he wrote. “… We bought this game when ‘they’ put the fear of God in the public —‘Just two weeks, stay home, blah, blah’ — THAT WAS OVER 6 MONTHS AGO and there is still a large segment of the population that is buying that steaming pile of BS and are Fauci-ists who feel that it won’t be ‘safe’ until the end of 2021 or 2022.”
There’s been a lot of justified talk about the ways in which our president has legitimized public expressions of the racism that used to be kept mostly under wraps.
But that email — and so much of what I see in our newspaper’s letters, on social media and certainly from Washington every day — illustrates two other characteristics that make me worry about the kind of country we’re handing over to our children and grandchildren.
Willful ignorance is one. More and more, science and learning are ridiculed and resented, not respected and certainly not celebrated. Instead, preposterous conspiracy theories are embraced.
Then there’s the selfishness. It may not all reach the level of narcissistic self-interest that seems to be our president’s only motivation, but it’s there in every person who think his/her “freedom” outweighs everyone else’s right to shop or gather without exposure to a deadly disease.
We can debate the degree to which our society should remain shut down. But wearing masks should be a no-brainer, given the scientific near-unanimity.
Can you imagine someone equating the ultimate sacrifices of brave men on D-Day with the discomfort of wearing a mask for 15 minutes at Costco? Lack of perspective seems to be our secondary epidemic.
I’m probably not changing minds with this column. It’s hard to imagine anyone still being “undecided” about any of the issues facing our country today, including what should happen Nov. 3.
But this presidency will end someday. This disease will be defeated.
What worries me is the kind of country they’ll leave behind. There’s no vaccine for ignorance and selfishness. Can we cure ourselves?