Being Unfriended; Finding Freindship On Facebook

WHEN ONE JOINS FACEBOOK, one soon discerns that Facebook Is something of an adult version of public education, name the grade, minus the "adult". To wit, Facebook is at once a meat market, a pecking order, and a feeding frenzy of tangled friendships, grudges, or, as the great poet Theodore Roethke said in a poem: "a steady storm of correspondences". One can play god. One can "friend", or "unfriend", with god like powers of creation and destruction one hasn't used since high school. Friend and unfriend, though two discrete categories, are interchangeable, marginally distinguishable, subject to momentary reversal, just like they are in grades one through twelve. Facebook, one discerns, is a safe haven for those billions who long to return to childhood, or who never left it, or are still immersed in it, chronologically. As we move in and out of favor, we surely resist the temptation to assign rankings, a top ten friends list. In my beginning, I decided to share no information on my Facebook page. Facebook, it is well known, does not treat personal information with the proprietary respect it deserves. At least, not yet. The public is restless, legislation is pending. I have no wish to voluntarily become merchandise. They'll have to pry it out of me, post by elusive post. This avoidance of the exploitation of the self approach severely limits the number of invitations to friendship one receives, a price I am willing to pay. At the outset I went on a friendship finding binge, and sent out eager pleas for acceptance to high school friends from forty five years ago, long lost friends who moved away throughout adult life, and anyone else who moved. I was never rejected. On Facebook, finding friendship is easy. Too easy. I soon learned the perils of this: I soon found was reading posts from evangelicals and right wing Trumpers, and nearly buried myself in scripture and photos of stranger's grand children, and notices of extended family outings for which I could find no relevance. At that point I decided to construct my own little bubble, like, apparently, everyone else. Like Goethe said: when I realized that everyone invents his own religion, I decided to invent mine". Out to the unfriended bone pile I sent the Christian righteous, the right wing extremists, and the purveyors of baby pictures and family minutia, and ended up with a nice tight little community of eccentric progressive intellectuals and sports fans, my kind of people. At last, safely ensconced in my ideological bubble. Or so I thought. What goes around comes around, as we all like to say. I got unfriended three times, and I hope the slaughter is over. One, a high school hot blonde sweetheart, who committed the duel sin of posting religious platitudes and family pics, cut me off before I did the same to her. Another, my housemate in grad school, evidently was offended by my theft of his left wing thunder, and, he being an attorney, took decisive action. He was always weird anyway, always intent on proving himself the smartest dude in the room which he usually was. Perhaps he felt threatened by my incisive comments on shares; at this point, it seems I will never know. Then, the old girlfriend from the seventies, who married well, got rich, and became a hard line Christian conservative. She undoubtedly was repulsed by my liberalism and irreligiosity, and cut me off before I could get to her. She used to be a flaming racist in any event, and I can only hope and assume that she grew out of it, like most of the country did. Again, I will never know. I think my friend finding binge is at last quelled, and I am content to simply sit back, do a little sharing, commenting, messaging and posting, and see what happens next. The friendship offers still come in, as I suspect they always will, but only at a trickle, which is fine with me. I never turn anyone down.