Facebook and election season: a bad combination

I’ve had a Facebook account for several years now.  If you’ve never been on Facebook, you aren’t missing much and you should probably just keep on doing whatever else you’ve been doing to occupy your time.  But if you are a Facebook person, you know that one of the delightful ways the people on your friends list there like to do to keep you entertained is to post things that let you know what their political views are.

More often than not they aren’t posting their own thoughts - they are just “sharing” articles, ads, and humorous cartoons that reflect their political leanings.  Now that the presidential election is drawing near, the sharing of these types of ads has reached a fever pitch. 

I’ve found that most of the people I’m linked with on Facebook are Republicans, but there are a smattering of very vocal Democrats mixed in there who are helping to keep things balanced for me.

But whether they support Romney or Obama, I’ve found that the political ads these people tend to post have a few things in common:

-  They almost never pertain to the candidate they support.  Nearly everything that they share is some kind of attack on the guy they want to lose.

-  These negative postings are usually very brief, extremely caustic, and way over the top.

-  If anyone replies to these postings with a counter-argument or even a “hey, isn’t this a little one-sided?” observation, the original poster pounces on that reply with an aggressive defense of the validity of the original attack.

All these years I’ve been complaining about how negative and silly politicians are with how they run their campaigns, and I thought they were the problem.  Well now, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, we all have the capability to orchestrate our own little campaigns for our favorite candidates and it turns out that we do the exact same things we supposedly hate about how politicians behave during elections.

I suppose elections are like sporting events to a lot of people.  It’s our team against their team, and nothing is more satisfying than making the other side look like idiots.  The whole thing seems rather pointless to me, though.

If you are already opposed to the candidate these ads attack you’ll think they’re hilarious and you’re bound to hit the “Like” button right away.  If the attack is against your guy you’re likely to feel your blood pressure go up and comb the Internet for ammunition to fire back with your own outlandish negative ads directed at the other side.

But how about the people who are on the fence?  You’d think such people would be the real target of these ads, but how many of them will decide to vote for Obama because of an ad that says Romney wants to raise your taxes so he can give the money to his rich pals at the country club?  And how many undecided voters many will throw their support to Romney when they are told that Obama is a closet Muslim and a socialist who hates America? 

Not very many of them will be swayed by the silly things they see on Facebook, I can assure you.  The most likely outcome is that they’ll get turned off by the whole experience and block any future posts from these wannabe campaign managers.

It would be nice, just once, to find that someone had posted something positive and fact-based about what the guy they support wants to do should he win office.  That’s what I care about.  I don’t want to see Obama’s birth certificate or his college transcripts and I don’t care about Romney’s tax returns or what companies Bain Capital bought out when he was in charge of it.  I’m less concerned with their pasts than I am about the country’s future.

A house divided

As I survey some of the big stories making the news these days – a typically rancorous presidential contest, angry and unbalanced individuals going on mass shooting rampages, and even the increasingly tiresome Chick-Fil-A controversy – I sense a pattern emerging.  I think that all of these things reflect a growing spirit of divisiveness, distrust, and intolerance in our country.  The United States seems to be less and less united with each passing day.

There is a lot of stress in this country right now.  We have been mired in an economic recession for more years than we care to count and no one seems to know how to get us out of it.  Prices keep rising and those of us who have jobs have seen our wages stagnate.  We are trying to wind down two separate wars but there is no sense of victory and no way of knowing what, if anything, our blood and treasure have bought us in the sands of the Middle East.  And speaking of deserts, it’s way too hot and way too dry in most of the country, and that is not doing anything to improve our economic situation or our mood.

People who are frustrated tend to get angry, and that anger needs something to focus on.  And since none of us like to think that we are the problem, we look for a cause outside of ourselves and our peer group. 

Most of the people I know tend to be conservative, so I hear a lot about how liberals are ruining the country.  It’s Obama, it’s the gay agenda, it’s the atheists who don’t want to let our kids pray in school that are destroying us from within.  If only we could stamp out their influence on our government and culture we would be a great nation once again.

There is no shortage of vitriol coming from the left, either.  They tell us that right-wingers are self-righteous, greedy, heartless people.  Most conservatives are white and well-off, the thinking goes, and they are desperately trying to cling to power in an increasingly diverse country.  They are the party of the privileged, and they could care less that the average American is struggling to get by.

Of course that kind of us-against-them thinking has always been around, but in the past there was a sizable moderate, middle-of-the-road portion of the population both in Congress and among the general public who could prod things towards resolution.  These days moderates are seen as traitors to the cause, as Republicans- or Democrats-in-name-only, and they have become unelectable.

So we are at war with each other.  Everything’s a battle and our side has to win.  What kind of future does a country in this state have?

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  Abraham Lincoln said that over 150 years ago and he was paraphrasing what Jesus said many centuries before that.  Some things remain true even as times and circumstances change.

We will always have differences with each other.  But when our differences are all that define us - when we live for the conflict and compromise is unacceptable under any circumstances - we don’t have much of a future.  Oftentimes a common enemy unites diverse people, but most of our “enemies” today (the budget deficit, misuse of our natural resources, failure to respect each other’s right to live and worship as we see fit) are results of our own selfishness and short-sightedness. 

Unless we can take a look in the mirror and realize that we are the problem (not Obama or Romney or Rush or the Chick-Fil-A cows) we will continue to fight about everything, all the time. 

I do think good leadership could help.  Sometimes one great leader really can redirect people’s attention and energy away from partisan squabbling towards something more productive.  I do not sense that kind of leadership potential in any major political figure in the public eye today, and I’m not sure how long we can wait for one to appear before we are too far gone and the house collapses.