Ugh. I did it. I fell off of the wagon. I’ve been so good too.
I’ve been taking it a day at a time, changing the things I can and accepting
the things I can’t. Tonight it just got to be too much. I got into a full blown
political Facebook fight. I railed. I ranted. I posted links to articles that
supported my argument that no one in the thread read. Eventually everything
devolved into name calling and by the end we were figuring out how to spell our
grunts and beat each other to death with bleached femur bones through social
media. Sigh…

What does this have to do with Fatherhood? Well, the immediate political part has nothing to do with being a father. On the other hand, the futile act of trying
to make a point to someone who does not want to, or is incapable of
hearing it is very similar to having a two-year-old in the
house.

Now before you go off and call me an elitist hypocrite for
comparing anyone who has a differing political opinion than mine to a toddler,
please allow me to clarify. Everyone in a political fight on Facebook is a
toddler. Both sides. Every time. Case in
point:

We like shiny things

Just like my kid thinks a picture of Elmo is a Rembrandt, folks on Facebook also like simple images. “Share if” and “Like if” posts plague my time line. The political ones are THE WORST. We reduce our opinions to snippy image macros and pass them around like trading cards. They are baited hooks waiting for someone to  comment about how the image represents a complex topic in an overly simplified way… and then it begins. 

Both sides are just waiting for the other side to stop
talking (typing).

For toddlers this is called parallel play. The two kids play
next to each other, but not with each other. The only time the two interact is
when one pisses the other one off. Then they punch each other in the face.

On Facebook it is the same way. We type long, elaborate
paragraphless screeds. We practically ignore the opposition’s comments, scanning
them only for fallacies that we can exploit in our own witty retorts. The
person we’re arguing with could write the Gettysburg Address. We’d
read “score” and “conceived” and argue that they are
pro-sex heathens who worship phallic deities.

No one shares.

Sure, everyone “shares” their opinion, but no one
shares what really matters. Sharing is giving something up so the other person
can have it. In political facebook fights no one gives anything up. We just
pull and pull and pull until we either get what we want or the other person
cries and runs away. Like toddlers.

So how does this help
me to be a better dad?

Well… I’m not sure it does. It does help me be a better
citizen of social media. It helps me stay sane. It allows me to realize that I
am not a toddler, and that behaving like one on Facebook not only degrades me,
but also contributes nothing to the world as a whole. I’ll get to vote for
whoever I want in November, and no amount of political bloviating on Facebook
can take that away. That’s pretty cool.

So maybe my political Facebook fight didn’t
make me a better father. I suppose every life experience doesn’t have to make me a better dad. Maybe this time it was the opposite. Maybe being a father can make
me a better person.

ELMO 2012!!!

Love, Dad