Hello, friends! I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and your new year is off to a great start! I apologize for the lack of new articles, but the past couple of months have been extremely busy. In addition, I’ve had a hard time coming up with relevant ideas and good ways to present them. One thing I’ve learned about blogging is sometimes, you have more ideas than you can write about. But other times, the well is dry. There are always things going on and good topics, but I don’t always care enough to write about them! Anyway, I’m glad to be back at it and I hope you’ll continue to read. Please feel free to comment and share our site with your friends!
One of the things I’ve noticed since the 2016 election is a significant increase in the overall negativity of my left-leaning friends. This is no surprise. I’m sure we all expected it after the national hissy-fit thrown after they lost a fair and legal election. Given that, I expect the occasional ‘woe-is-me’ or ‘sky-is-falling’ post. I think some of these people are just going too far for their own good.
I have one friend in particular who must do nothing but look for articles slamming any aspect of the Trump administration. This person’s feed is a non-stop cascade of negativity. If it isn’t about Trump directly, it’s about the racist/sexist/homophobic nature of…just about everything. Just today (so far), this person has posted five articles from the New York Times, along with single articles from Washington Post, Politico, Slate, Mother Jones, NPR, and other left-leaning sources. Not all of these are necessarily political, but you get the idea. Every day is like this. I just scroll past them, so it isn’t a big deal to me personally, but how healthy can it be for a person to focus so intently on their hate? It would drive me crazy.
A related problem has politics or social issues being inserted into every story. This is nothing new, but it seems to be on the increase. Another friend posted an article this week about the redeeming social aspects of the latest Star Wars movie. The words “military-industrial complex” and “cisheteronormativity” (which I’m pretty sure is a made-up word) appear in this piece. I thought the movie was about good versus evil and cool special effects. I sat through the whole thing and never once did the issue of cisheteronormativity enter my mind. Sometimes a movie is just a movie. Sometimes bad things happen between people of different races/genders/backgrounds which have nothing to do with any of those factors. Inserting all of this stuff we’re supposed to be constantly worried about into every single aspect of life serves only to minimize it and cause fatigue. There’s a time and place for concerning one’s self with important issues. Those 2 hours in the theater for which I paid a stupid amount of money are going to be spent enjoying the movie and being with my family. That’s it.
Yeah, I know, none of this is new. I am aware that some conservatives did much the same thing during the previous administration. I posted my share of it, I’m sure. But it wasn’t the focus of my day. I didn’t go out of my way to find articles to post slamming the administration. I don’t have that kind of time. I really hope my friends on the left side of the aisle are able to get past this. I understand they’re unhappy. Heck, I am too in some ways. But what good does it do to spew this constant stream of crap from sources which are questionable, at best? I just scroll right past it, so it only serves to focus their misery. It must suck to be them.