What The World Needs Now Is a Lot Less Spite….

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

No, not just for some but for everyone

I love the song lyrics above. They give me hope that someday, probably in the very distant future the world will turn to love but we got a long ways to go before that can even remotely become reality. In the interim I am just praying that the world has a little less spite tomorrow than it does today. Spite is such a destructive thing to humanity. It is hateful rhetoric that we need a lot less of.

I want to make sure that we are on the same page so I will give you an official definition of that word here:

spite         noun

feeling a need to see others suffer ⤻
syn: malice, maliciousness, spitefulness, venom
malevolence by virtue of being malicious orspiteful or nasty ⤻
syn: cattiness, bitchiness, spitefulness, nastiness
verb 1

hurt the feelings of ⤻
syn: hurt, wound, injure, bruise, offend

The picture here is from a display panel at the Brown vs Board of Education historic site. The look on the young girls face behind the African-American entering a once segregated school is the ultimate spite in my mind. There is nothing in the world productive about spite. It only has a totally malicious, often hateful, purpose.

I ran across an invisible face of spite recently when I accepted a friend request from someone I remotely knew from my high school days. When his Facebook postings came up the next day he was passing on a cartoon with the final frame calling President Obama a “shit head”.  When I commented that I wonder if calling the first dark-skinned president a shit head was intentional or just Freudian. He said he just thought it was funny and did not hate the president.

But this brought out one of his other “friends” screaming spite in a diatribe about how the president was evil and the worst person in the history of the world. I enjoy debating people who have different political or philosophical outlooks on life but I have learned from experience that is not possible to do that with people who scream so loud. They are not about to hear anything but their own rants or maybe reinforcement of their prejudices.  Sadly I am discovering too many of my previous high school classmates in this mode. I wonder what happened to them in the intervening years to cause such anger toward anyone? I wonder if that young girl in the picture who is now in her 60s or 70s ever mellowed out? I pray that she did…

What the world needs now is a lot less spite, then maybe we can move on to a little love….

Fifty Years From Now…

Recently someone requested that I be his new “friend” on Facebook. I’m not sure I even know him but I think he is a sibling of one of my high school classmates. One thing that Facebook is good at is to give you a long lists of  “friends of your friends” to entice to add more. I guess they get more revenue that way but I don’t know for sure.  Anyway I went ahead and accepted the request and within a day or two that person’s Facebook page appeared on my screen. The first post was him passing along someone else’s post. It was a comic book type spread that ended up with a not very gracious picture of the president and calling him a “shit head”.

I quickly, maybe too quickly, commented that I wonder if he called the first president of color a shit head was intentional or Freudian? That started a fairly long discussion with a my new friend and some of his friends. My new friend says he just thought it was funny and didn’t hate anyone but some of his other “friends” came on with vitriol attacks of the president screaming YES he is a shit head.

I bring up this conversation for a secondary reason and that is about the legacy people are leaving with their Facebook pages and many other Internet sources. Do they realize that what they post will be readily available to their grandkids, great grandkids, and great great grandkids? Do they realize that their words are permanently etched for others to see?

Being a retired Information Technology guy I know that Google, or whatever replaces it fifty years from now, will be thousands of times more powerful than it is today. All my new friends’ heirs, or anyone else for that manner will have to do is Google his name and they will find that he personally condoned a verbal personal attack of a president of his country. Does my new friend realize that everything he pens on the Internet today will form a legacy of just who he is for posterity.

I’m sure my new “friend” is a decent enough fellow who I would probably like in person if I ever got to know him in person. But this first encounter has soured me to even making that a possibility. I don’t know, maybe he just watches too much Fox News and therefore thinks it is ok to casually trash another person’s character because it is funny? Fox News certainly makes billion of bucks doing just that everyday.  Now I am not saying here that it is not ok to disagree with someone’s actions, especially our public figures. I do my share of that but I try never attack someone’s character with cheap, malicious, and especially racist words. If I ever do I hope someone will quickly call me to task like I called my new friend to task.

I turned off the “Follow” feature of Facebook for my new “friend” so I guess I will never really know him. I just hope he becomes more sensitive to others and be more careful what he does on his Facebook page.

About Me & FaceBook….

After yesterday’s post about people resisting change and not adopting the latest technology I thought I would take the opposite route today. Today I am going to talk about Facebook by giving you a view of my personal habits there. How is that for yin/yang??

Unlike so many, I have not made it a life’s goal to grow my “friends” list to any gargantuan level.  Some I follow there have hundreds of “friends”, some even have thousands! I think mine is currently almost fifty and several of those are institutions not people. I know that is pathetic by most standards for that site.  Who has only fifty friends and some of them not even people??

Another thing about Facebook that I simply don’t get are all the games you can play. I admit up front that I am just not a game player and have never tried them or even know how to access them but I do get it seems daily someone wanting me to play this game or that with them. I do dabble occasionally with some free Euchre and Pinochle apps when I am thoroughly bored and am too lazy to do anything else.  It passes the time…

I do get onto Facebook at least a couple of times a day. I visit the Will Rogers page frequently there and a couple of others just to see what is going on. A local town council member is very active on Facebook so I count on him to keep me up on what is happening in our small town politics (thanks Anton).  A few family members and past friends also get a glance once in a while.

Facebook is a valuable medium as long as you don’t get obsessed with it. It seems most people complain about how busy and hectic their lives are but millions  spend way too much time in social media sites. You can’t seem to walk into any place where people congregate without seeing as least a few kids, and some not so kids, Facebooking. Yeah, I understand it is a verb now.  Maybe if they put down their cell phone once in a while life would seem considerably slower for them. Maybe their hectic lives wouldn’t seem so hectic. That is the opinion of this old but tech savvy senior citizen.  Since I stream my two most active blog sites to Facebook I guess I better check my Facebook page now to see the reactions to this post, I don’t want to lose any friends over my reckless words here …. 🙂

Writing My Material….

 

An important part of my daily read is the Will Rogers Facebook page as shown above. It, along with the half-dozen books about him on my bookshelf give me a lifetime of material for this blog at RJsCorner.

Will inspires me for his wit, wisdom, and humor. But maybe even more so for his endurance as he put out thousands of  “posts” of his day.

Will inspires me with his method of delivery.  One of his most famous quotes is “All I know is what I read in the newspaper” and then he would proceed to put his spin on the story. The vast majority of my posts start out as a quote from what I read around the Internet. I then expand on it with my own interpretation.

Will inspires me with his calm patience. I get attacked on occasion for what I say.  I, like him, try to keep the attitude of “I never met a man I didn’t like” and deal with those upset yahoos with calmness and a sense of humor. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Will inspired me with his writing style. Kind of laid back and nothing too formal. My header above has one of my favorite quotes from him.  I try to do the best I can and don’t take life too serious. Even that gets me in trouble once in a while as people just take what I say here too serious when I mean it to be tongue-in-cheek.

Will inspires me….

 

 

If Men Could Get Pregnant….

Got to show you this one from my Facebook link. LOL

If You’re Not Paying For It……..

Source: Facebook isn’t free – USATODAY.com.

The best way I’ve ever heard Facebook’s business model described is simple: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” What makes Facebook so valuable is that you, your friends, and everyone else who uses the site are sitting ducks for marketers out to exploit your information to sell you things.

This article is about FaceBook but could be about many things in the world today. The saying “If you are not paying for it you are not the customer.” goes beyond this one particular company but it is also very appropriate to Facebook. Facebook’s real customers are the ones who pay them for the info you put on you page. Let’s face it (pun intended) that Facebook and Google make their millions by selling info about each of us.

I am not a conspiracy type guy so I am not one to put an evil face  (pun intended again 😉 ) on either of these companies. They both provide a worthwhile service.  Being able to keep up with long time friends and being able to find info on just about anything with just a few keystrokes has changed our basic way of life in the twenty-first century.  I can’t imagine what is coming next in this area.

But we must also realize they both of these companies know what side of the bread the butter is on. I know that after I “googled” about getting a new car there suddenly appeared dozens of emails from the various car manufactures. I became quite a bit of work to parse through all of that and rightly put it in the virtual trash.  Since I am not a frequent user of Facebook, I seldom post anything and only get on the site a couple of times a week, I can’t say much about them.