Somewhere in the recesses of the settings of my web browser are the login credentials for my Facebook account. Ihave not used them, at least consciously, for almost eight years, after being active on Facebook from 2009 to 2016. Before I left I deactivated my account, jumping through all the hoops they make you do before you can leave. I made no announcement to my "friends" before I did. I did not want to. I wanted to make the Facebook version of the "Irish goodbye". I knew my avatar would then just be a grey featureless silhouette on people's friends list. I wonder if any remain. Sometimes I am curious to see who might still have me as a friend.
The temptation today was strong, as it sometimes is, to return to Facebook. I would reactivate my account and make a single post, and see if anyone notices. People might friend me again, as they did long ago, not because they are my friends, but because I am a member of their high school class, or maybe off by one. year. My high school class, which graduated in the perfect town in the perfect state and the perfect peak of civilization, is a cult.
I compared Facebook to going to a high school reunion where they locks the doors of the gymnasium and they don't let anyone leave.
In high school, most of my classmates did not care strongly about politics. I probably cared about politics the most of anyone I know. It was rare to meet anyone in my league, as far as awareness of current events, and my passion for America to follow a certain political course. Perhaps Molly, bur she only came to our high school in our senior year, a transfer from our cross-town rival, where all the "cowboys" went (Reagan was probably very popular there, but in the default sort of way).
Most of the lukewarm ones, the smart college-bound kids, were liberals, like our history teaches, but only weakly so. Everyone "hated" Reagan, except the ones who explicitly liked him.
It is ironic that the politicization of my cohort, the Class of 1983 resulted in so many of them becoming just the way I was in high school---an obnoxious clueless Democrat fanboys and fangirls. This was clear by the time I left Facebook. It included not only my close friends---the ones I kept in touch with, and stayed in contact with, until I was no longer invited to their get-togethers. The Facebook crowd included plenty of acquaintances with whom I had warm relations in high school.
I had warm relations with everyone in high school, or tried to. I had a very idealized vision of my high school class. It felt at the time like a little utopia. I suffered like any teenage, the usual heartbreaks, etc., but I knew it was all the consequence of my own actions. I loved all my classmates.
I left Facebook because I knew it would take heroic acts of charity on my part to continue loving them--to heroic for what I was capable.
Today I was fantasizing, as I sometimes do, about logging into Facebook using my old credentials buried in my web browser settings, reactivating my account, and making a post: "One thihg to say: Make America Great Again!"
I would wait for the snarky replies to come in. Perhaps a message like this would from one of the effeminate feminist-truckling liberal men of my cohort, who are the bitchy enforcers of the opinions that everyone is supposed to have, the latter being guarded by the sturdy liberal women, who are the modern day counterparts of the frontier ladies who marched through downtowns smashing windows of saloons. Not much has changed, except in the old days it was done in the name of Christian principles and now it is done in the name of Anti-Christian principles.
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