I have been wanting to write this post for over a month now and just haven't had the energy to sit down and write it down...until now. I'm sure you all recall a certain furlough that happened about a month which caused quite an uproar on The Facebook. Now, don't get me wrong, I love me a little Facebook time and seeing what all my peeps are posting, but occasionally I just get fed up! Don't you!? I mean, seriously, on one of my friends timelines he had six Obama/government bashing posts in one day. I think we get the point.
Now I'm not saying that the furlough didn't suck, because it totally did! And if I had been directly affected by it, I would have felt like complaining too; however, what good would it do me? When you see all these people posting complaint after complaint and whine after whine on Facebook it's enough to make you go crazy. The only thing they are accomplishing by all that complaining is pissing off half of their Facebook friends. I know during the furlough I hid all post from three different people on my feed because I had just had enough.
I think the difference between me and the people who shared all those anti-government posts is that I always try to spin things in a positive way. You know that saying that someone always has it worse than you do? I take that saying very seriously. So yeah, it sucks that a huge portion of our country was out of the job for a few weeks. They probably had to rework their budget and cut out a few things like movies, or eating out at restaurants, or buying a book they've been wanting to read. But even with all the crap things going on in our country and with our government at least our country doesn't look like this:
Granted, the US has its own poverty problems, but the fact of the matter is that our 16% rate of poverty doesn't even come close to the 77% in countries like Haiti. Or the 60%-70% in nearly every country in Africa. Yeah, America's got it's problems, but I still feel pretty blessed to live here.
Don't you hate it when people judge you, or stereotype you, or assume things about you? I know I do. How do you think President Obama feels, or the members of congress feel, about all the hate that has been hurled toward them recently? Believe or not, those people are human, and they have feelings. I try my very best not to judge anyone. Sometimes it's hard, but I try. Every post that someone put on facebook, or shared, or liked is just perpetuating hate. I'm not okay with that. The God I believe in is a God of love and not hate, so I try to live my life loving others instead of hating and judging them. I have no idea why they have made the decisions they have made, but it's not my place to judge them for those decisions. My place is to accept the decisions and try and make the best of them or to get behind a legitimate cause in the hopes of changing those decisions for the better. Complaining won't do any good, so why bother?
Politics aren't the only thing on Facebook that are causing arguments and un-friending to happen. Another one is the R word. That's right - Religion. GASP! Now, I am a religious person. Everyone who knows me already knows this about me. It is something I am very open about, very vocal about, and very serious about. However, I know that not all of my friends on Facebook feel the same way as I do about religion, so I try not to overload them with too many "spiritual posts" because I don't want them to unfriend me. Some may say that that means I am stifling my opinions or hiding who I really am, but I don't see it that way. I am trying to be considerate of my fellow Facebookers by respecting their opinions. I only wish they would do the same for me.
As I said I have a few friends on Facebook who don't believe in religion which is fine with me, but when they start posting anti-religion posts, that really gets to me. Just like with politics I am overwhelmed by the judgement that these people are perpetuating. Particularly because many of these people left their religion because they were feeling judged. Now they are returning the favor. On one of my friend's posts someone commented, "If anyone posts more than two religious posts, I unfriend them." I like to think that my friends would respect me enough to just block me from their news feed rather than unfriending me like a twelve year old would after an argument.
This hurts more than the political posts because these are directed at me whether they mean them to be or not. They are. Some of the things I see are hard to stomach and even though those people don't believe in God, I do. And believe it or not, I don't pray for the world to believe in God, I just pray that the world would find it's own humanity and stop the madness that is happening all around us. I will probably post a more in depth post about religion and my views on it in the future, but for now, I want to leave you with one thought.
"The only thing we have to HATE is HATE itself."
