Editorial by Gwyn Lurie
A Thing or Not a Thing, That is the Question
R
ecently and apparently out of nowhere, one of my daughters got “blocked” by one of her closest “friends.” For those of you who don’t have screenagers and are missing out on a front row seat to millennial and Gen Z social mores, “blocking” is the Boomer equivalent of “unfriending” on Facebook. It’s what a “friend” does to you on Snapchat and other forms of social media when you do something that (even mildly) bothers them, or worse, is merely the result of the random ruling of a clique. I could tell my daughter was upset by this, even more so confused, because she got blocked by one of her closest friends with whom she was inseparable. Until suddenly, and inexplicably, they were not. Sensing her consternation over the surprising turn of events (though certainly not uncommon in the social landscape of today’s youth) I made a suggestion that I thought was quite reasonable: “Why don’t you just call her and talk to her?” I asked. My daughter looked at me like I had suggested she take off her clothes and run naked through the boy’s locker room. “Mom,” she said, with all the indignance and umbrage she could muster, “that’s not a thing.” Gen Z thought bubble: “Okay, Boomer. You’re an idiot.” So, apparently, in 2020, looking someone in the eye and talking through a problem is “not a thing.” I love and respect my children. And I adore most of their friends. But I also fear that we are raising a generation of emotional cowards. That their dependence on social media as the primary form of interpersonal communication, now more than ever, is depriving them of the opportunities to develop the social skills that allow us to have healthy, deep, and durable interpersonal relationships. And the courage to take responsibility for their words or actions. The tools to work out problems. To respect different perspectives and ways of communicating. The courage to engage in communication that creates opportunities for intimacy. The chance to experience how relationships can strengthen when they are battle tested. How, when we invest in them, relationships can actually become stronger in the broken places. Challenging stuff even for those of us who grew up having eye contact. My older daughter and her girlfriends regularly receive texts from boys the contents of which are often stunningly offensive to me. Things are said and invitations made in quickly disappearing messages that, in a million years, would not/could not be said while looking someone in the eye. And what about these kids who send crude electronic invitations? Are they actual friends? Our kids, who have a handful of very close actual friends, have the illusion of having thousands of friends, or “followers” – a word that has come into its own with the advent of social media. When I was growing up, calling my friends “followers” would not have been a compliment but rather would have evoked Jonestown. I think the sheer numbers of followers our kids have creates an illusion of many friendships when we all know what actually makes friends valuable is quality not quantity. Why am I bringing all of this up? Recently someone in our community wrote an Op Ed taking a strong position on a controversial local issue. I personally happened to think the writer made a number of good points though some disagreed, of course. What I found disappointing was not the passionate debate or disagreement that resulted, but rather that one community member (who has known the writer for years) took offense at the writer’s perspective and thus declared that she would “unfriend” him on Facebook. I’m not personally a big Facebook user, though at one point I did appreciate the function it served to reconnect me to a wider group of friends. But over time I found the platform to be more of a time suck than a value and eventually I didn’t appreciate the confusing and sometimes destructive role it began to play in our country’s political discourse. But I digress. Here are my questions: If someone unfriends you because they object to a position you’ve taken, were they ever actually a “friend”? And if we only “friend” those who share our own points of view, aren’t we asking to live in a world where we are only ever looking at infinite reflections of ourselves? The selfie-ization of Life? Most importantly, isn’t that what got us into this cauldron of mutual intolerance in the first place? So here we are, at home, socially distancing. Much like my teenage daughters who, in many ways, have been doing this for much of their adolescence,
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EDITORIAL Page 324 14 – 21 May 2020
• The Voice of the Village •
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