I use facebook primarily as a means of staying in touch with my college friends and secondarily as a political soap-box. I think a big handful of past co-workers who added me put me on their "Hide This Person From My News Feed" list immediately afterward, because I am very not-silent about the fact that everyone I know needs to WAKE UP and DO SOMETHING other than sit around and whine... Read whatever I'm reading and be do more than they are to save the world/ the whales/ your community/ your kids/ real food/ reproductive rights/ Haiti/ real food and reproductive rights of the Haitian community/ etc.
Anyway, for this reason, I won't add any of my redneck family from rural Virginia (even if it's urban where they live, their minds are back-woods and 150 years in the past). Most people on my friends list won't jump down my throat if they disagree or don't care about whatever informative link I've just posted, but I don't want my godadmned FAMILY jumping down my throat about it. It's hard enough ever being around them just hating THEM so much without them hating me back.
My little sister however is one of the sweetest, kindest, most caring, most forgiving people on the planet (we are practically polar opposites*). She tends not to be very politically active, she shops at wal-mart, she buys factory farmed ground beef and she eats it. So I was flabbergasted today when she put up this link about the South Carolina state senate passing a bill requiring that any woman needing an abortion wait 24 hours after the ultrasound before she can undergo the procedure, with a comment about how it might be "time [for her] to find a different state." In the link there is a little afterthought about "...give[ing] mothers more time to consider the health risks" of having an abortion, without even touching on the massive "health risks" associated with having a baby in a hospital in america.
My sister is a doula-in-training, knows everything there is to know about pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing in this country (except where NOT to shop and what NOT to feed them, but that's for another time) and is wildly pro-child and pro-proliferation-of-the-species as a whole. It's not as if she is un-informed or mis-informed about anything having to do with pregnancy and birth. But she has no issues with having our racist, redneck, backwoods, woman-hating uncles and cousins on her friends page and the comment thread that ensued was EPIC.
It made me realize that I'm kind of a weak-ass spaghetti-spine for wanting to hide from their criticism of sundry political truths, instead of wanting to wake them up along with the rest of my facebook community. I guess in my mind they're past saving and it would just start a big catfight and I hate it when facebook isn't FUN anymore. But I have to applaud my sister for not sitting around keeping her opinions to herself to avoid conflict. She is one smart, tough cookie and I love her to pieces.
*seriously. While she was getting expensive blonde highlights installed in her hair, mine was forming dreadlocks from neglect. She plucks her eyebrows daily and gets up at the crack of dawn to start her whole beauty regimen before work; I'd rather sleep. She does her nails in little french manicures and really does whine when one of them breaks. When old men are creepy at her she laughs it off and thinks it's so cute, where it's all I can do not to kick em in their patriarchy-celebrating gonads. I'm vehemently childfree and believe that proliferation of human beings is destroying the planet AND the quality of life for the human beings already here, but all she wants to do with her life is Nanny and birthing and hanging out with wee-ones. We've got virtually NOTHING to go on together, but somehow we're like... BEST friends. It's really odd.
...And wonderful :)
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