30 Days in the Hole

I guess that desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures. The last time I posted to my blog was in November of 2014, and that post was prompted by something that was happening on Facebook. At that time, I was an admin on a military history page on FB and had posted about the controversy that conservatives had cooked up over a song that was played during a Veteran's Day concert on the Washington Mall. Bruce Springsteen, Zac Brown, and Dave Grohl covered a 1969 Credence Clearwater Revival anti-war anthem called Fortunate Son and the right-wing echo chamber accused them of "hating the troops" or some such imbecilic nonsense. I thought it might make for an interesting and timely post for the military history page, Livingbattlefield. Only to find myself accused of being insufficiently pro-American by the British twit that owned the page! He told me that our there was no place for "politics" on the page and proceeded to take down my post. To say I was angered by his reaction would be putting it very mildly, and that incident surely contributed to the break in our relationship that would come a couple of months later.

The really interesting thing is that the post was hardly political at all. Rather, it was a balanced look at the various ways in which the music of the 1960's has been used as the soundtrack for the entire era, including the Vietnam War. The first few comments on the post, from our page followers, were of the Neanderthal variety and I guess that was all he needed to hear. Obviously, they had already gotten the memo telling them to be outraged over the song selection and immediately registered their displeasure over my post. And probably without even bothering to read it past the first paragraph. I could count on one hand the number of people following that page who were capable of higher reasoning. Most of them were barely literate, and their political views were to the right of Attila the Hun. It still amazes me to think I stuck it out over there for nearly a year.

And here I am a year later still struggling with the same old bullshit. Facebook blocked me for 7 days for posting lyrics to a song in a comment thread, and then followed that up with a 30-day block after I was back barely a week. I knew it was going to happen again, but wrongly assumed that there would be some intermediate sentence of perhaps 15 days. Instead, it went from 7 days to 30 days. I went through the stages of Facebook death, and have finally arrived at acceptance. It is just incredible how much time there is in the day without Facebook greedily devouring the hours. I have rearranged my library and started reading books again. And my need to fill the extra hours has led me to start planning some home improvement projects. In the middle of my 7-day ban, I was struck by the crazy urge to replace the bathtub in our upstairs bathroom, and started watching youtube videos to teach myself how to go about doing it. Only to have my son plead with me not to start such an ambitious project because it would surely not get finished once I got back on Facebook. I deferred to the lad's wisdom and put down the sledgehammer. But now, all things are possible. I am firmly convinced this will turn out to be a blessing in disguise.