If you have ever taken Yoga then you probably know about how the instructor tends to say things like, “focus on your breathing, think about the flow of the air coming in and out of your body, then just let everything go…”

So I have to pen his entry because it is my way of letting it go.

Facebook is toxic and why I allow myself to look at it is honestly beyond me. Self-control needs to be implemented. Anyway, a former colleague posted yesterday – an honest question:

Are there any good Republicans? I hate disliking an entire class of people, but I haven’t seen an ounce of human compassion from anyone on the right for two years.

I felt compelled to answer because if you have any common sense, you know he’s full of it here.

I’d like to think I’m a good person. I help others, my children are upstanding people, a lot of folks in the English department benefit from my hard work. I’ve never harmed anyone or you, for that matter.

Sadly, it spiraled out of control from there, based on this one sentence. Somehow they accused me of consenting to white supremacy because I don’t speak out about it on social media. The mind boggles! I think I replied in a pretty neutral way but again, they attacked.

Because it isn’t about Trump as much as it is ideologies. There are things on the Left side that I cannot wrap my mind around. I identify more financially with the Right. In the end, if we didn’t have to have labels and if MSM didn’t TELL everyone that certain people are bad or wrong, we’d probably be more on the same page. In the end, everyone does want similar things; we all want people to be good. We want better for our children. Better opportunities. Also, just because people don’t denounce something publicly on Facebook doesn’t mean they approve of it. Silence is not consent. A public forum can be detrimental to folks. Just writing this may hurt me. So that thinking simply isn’t logical. I believe that one should make informed decisions after facts are given, not based on how they feel emotionally in the moment. And that is why I AM a good person who IS a Republican.

What fired me up the most is a.) the original poster unfriended me but badmouthed me in comments too. But then, b.) a friend who was in my wedding actually commented that she’d unfriended me years ago because of my posts (I honestly don’t even write much, but I do tend to put out conflicting info with caveats of ‘let’s see if we can meet in the middle’). She said it was a shame because we were close and she can only guess that what changed me was “marriage and parenthood.” Am I crazy or does she mean that in an entirely negative sense??

Both she and this other guy are: over 40, never married, jobless. She has RA but became addicted to pain pills and entered rehab more than twice. She claims she cannot hold a job but she types all day on Facebook so she could definitely teach online. Truth be told, I kept her as a FB friend but unfollowed her feed because every post was about smoking weed and complaining that the government doesn’t give her enough money.

I’m sorry that the two pillars of – to me – a successful life are a bad thing to people like this. But it is also why they view the world the way they do. Had they good jobs and a family, dumb political maneuvers wouldn’t seem to earth-shattering to them.

So that said, I vow to focus more on myself and stop  even opening Facebook.  I enjoy Candy Crush while at work and doing data entry but I will need to find a way to play it not on that platform.