Sunday, May 16, 2010

If Something Is Only Virtual, Can It Still Be Pried From Cold, Dead Hands?

I don't like guns.

Some of you might read that and immediately jump to the conclusion that I want to ban guns. I don't ... just as I don't want to ban Swiss cheese, junk mail, corduroy pants, or Ke$ha, even though I don't like any of them, either.

It isn't so much the gun part of guns that I don't like, it's the method of convenient destruction that guns offer to those who are looking to conveniently destroy. That's the part I don't like.

I know it takes a person to pull a trigger. I know that "guns don't kill people, people kill people," and I agree with that. Still, guns make it easier. True killers will kill, regardless of the method, but not every killer is a true killer. Instead of being able to point, aim, and fire from 10 feet away in the heat of a given moment, will someone who isn't a true killer still take a life by coming in close and, with a carving knife, gutting their target from thong to throat, if necessary?

I don't think so. The method makes the opportunity more enticing.

In a similar vein, as far as I'm concerned, where have gone guns, so too has gone Facebook. Perhaps not as violently and perhaps not with as much controversy, but certainly with the same kind of damage that is inflicted by irresponsibility, abuse, and a patent disregard for one's fellow man. This is why, as is the case with guns, I don't like Facebook.

Baby recently received an e-mail from another Mommy who was launching a call-to-arms in support of her friend's middle school-aged Daughter, who had recently been the victim of cyber-bullying. The Mommy was rallying troops to attend the next school board meeting in hopes of having the Cyber Bully disciplined via suspension or expulsion. There weren't enough details in the e-mail for me to formulate a solid opinion as to whether cyber-bullying actually had occurred, however, for purposes of this argument, let's take that step and call him a Bully. With that, at the heart of the tale is the Bully's hatred for the Daughter and his expression of that hatred via Facebook. The question I'm left with is, If it weren't for Facebook, would the Bully have bothered the Daughter at all?

We all went to school. While there, we were either bullied or bullies, and if we weren't either, surely we knew one or the other or both. Or, at the very least, we've seen bullies in the movies (Biff Tannen from the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy and Scut Farkas from A CHRISTMAS STORY are two that spring immediately to mind). What makes these traditional bullies different from the cyber bullies of today is the fact that to bully someone old-school, the bully had to be physically present to torment his target. The bully had to actually push a kid on the playground, or take a kid's lunch money, or sting a kid with a rat tail in the locker room, or give a kid an Atomic Wedgie on the bus. An old-school bully actually did something more than type.

Now, this doesn't mean that the bullies of our youth deserve some kind of credit; they don't. What it means is that if a kid is bad, he'll be a bully, period; he doesn't need Facebook to be that bully. But, if a kid doesn't necessarily have it in him to be physically confrontational, does he use the convenient detachment of Facebook to cross a line he wouldn't otherwise cross?

"Eh," you say. "Kids will be kids." Perhaps. But what about the convenient destruction of adults by adults?

Keeping Baby in the story, she recently joined Facebook, not simply because her friends do it, but rather, it seems that once Facebook becomes the primary method of communication among some friends, it is expected to be the sole method of communication among all friends, and if you aren't on, you aren't in. It isn't quite a case of "If you are not with us, you are against us"; it's more like "If you are not with us ... who are you again?"

Part of the Facebook experience involves reconnecting with old high school friends. Baby has done this, with almost unanimously positive results. Almost.

One of those old high school friends - a man who shall remain nameless, but to whom I will refer as "Farmboy" - connected with Baby via Facebook and used, in my estimation, overtly flirtatious and wholly inappropriate language on Day One. Baby's thinking was that Farmboy's language was nothing to be concerned with.

Baby, God bless her, is naive.

I am of the opinion that any man - and, particularly, any married man with children - with whom Baby has had no contact for the last 20+ years, should not use terms of endearment such as "babe" or "darlin'" or "hon" right out of the gate, if ever. And even if you can make the argument that Farmboy's vocabulary is so limited that even his bank teller, his kid's substitute bus driver, and his favorite chain restaurant waitress get the babe-darlin'-hon treatment on a daily basis, you cannot possibly defend him when his immediate response to Baby's lament that a Facebook friend-request of a different male classmate was rejected, was that she should send naked photos of herself to change the rejecter's mind.

That's just me.

Speaking of me, I have no Facebook account. For starters, the last thing I need is to be beholden to one more online thing with a password. Secondly, any social networking site that allows my early morning newscast, my grocer, my employer, and my satellite television service to maintain pages is no longer a social networking site; it's a marketing channel. Why volunteer for one more of those? So, with Baby's permission, I live an occasionally vicarious Facebook existence through her page. I digress.

As weeks and months passed, Farmboy's language remained consistent in its inappropriateness ... until the day when he decided to raise the stakes and invite Baby to engage in online chat that one would consider not flirtatious, but downright dirty. Farmboy seemed to have little regard for the potential impact that this type of behavior might have on his own marriage and family - let alone ours - and Baby quickly shut him down. We've recounted this tale to third parties whose opinions we greatly respect, and all are in agreement with me that Farmboy was, from the outset, on the make, and that he thought Baby was ripe for the picking.

"Eh," you say. "If some guy has such low regard for his own marriage that he's willing to risk it all on a little dirty talk with an old high school acquaintance, maybe his marriage is doomed anyway."

Maybe, but maybe not.

Maybe, if Farmboy was considering some type of extramarital relationship, and he was not faced with the convenient detachment of a social network, but rather the intimate setting of a nightclub or hotel bar, where he might be rejected face-to-face or, worse yet, where he could actually be caught, he might reconsider his situation and look up the number of a marriage counselor.

Maybe, if the pseudo-bully was considering picking on someone not quite his own size, and he was not faced with the convenient detachment of a keyboard, but rather the intimate setting of a playground or gymnasium, where someone might actually fight back, he might reconsider his rage and take it out on a heavy bag.

Maybe, if the not-quite-killer was considering snuffing out the life of another, and he was not faced with the convenient detachment of a gun, but rather the intimate use of hands on a throat, where he would actually have to feel the life drain out of his victim, he might reconsider his path and choose to get help.

Guns don't kill people, just as Facebook doesn't hurt children or end marriages. But guns and Facebook sure do make those jobs easy.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Out With the New, In With the Old

Oh, the horror that is the New Year's resolution.


You know it. You make it. You love it.

Well, you love it for, what? A month, tops? Then you hate it. I've been right there with you. But with the winding-down of 2009 - a year I was ready to put behind me for reasons I have ... and have not ... shared here - I felt the urge to make 2010 different.

As I spent the last week of the year enjoying family, friends, and food (including the glory known as Baby's Homemade Christmas Eve Pierogies ... yes, you should be jealous), I pondered my goals for 2010. They seemed trivial (read more), comical (drink less), typical (lose weight), or impossible (be less judgmental of those whose spelling success lives or dies not on genuine spelling acumen, but on the absence of squiggly red lines). These resolutions, while perfectly functional, were duds. I wanted a resolution that MEANT something. I wanted to work towards a goal that, at the end of 2010, I could look back upon and feel a great sense of accomplishment about. I wanted the Cadillac of resolutions.

Well, that smooth-riding luxury sedan of an idea didn't pull into my consciousness and toss its keys to my mental valet until only a few hundred ticks before midnight on New Year's Eve.

To ring in the new year without risking our lives on Amateur Night Highway, Baby and I had decided to whip up a batch of cocktails and partake in Turner Classic Movies' Thin Man movie marathon - an airing of all six William Powell/Myrna Loy screwball-mysteries, in order, uncut and uninterrupted, all night long. Of course, by "all night long," we meant that the TV would be on all night long; we predicted tipsy slumber would carry us away sometime during the third film.

As an aside, I love the Thin Man films. I've seen them all countless times, I've quoted them in social situations, and I own (or have owned) copies of them in various forms, including LaserDisc. (For those of you unfamiliar with the LaserDisc, it was the "cutting-edge" format available between the VHS and DVD periods; imagine a DVD the size of a record album. For those of you unfamiliar with record albums, isn't it a school night for you?)

So there we were, Baby and me, with only a few minutes to go before the big midnight toast. As I had done in so many other must-see situations, I wielded my remote control like a Jedi using lessons learned from Obi-Wan TiVobi. Somewhere in the 58th minute of the 11th hour of the 365th day, I paused the Thin Man movie and switched tuners to catch Father Time (Dick Clark) and Baby New Year (Ryan Seacrest) ring in 2010. And it was at that moment of ultimate convergence - old year and new year, old host and new host, old movies and new technology - that it hit me: life has gotten easier, but in the process, life has lost its simplicity.

It's right about now when you might think that I will turn treacly and begin to yearn for the pleasures of my youth, all the while condemning the ills of technology. I won't, because today's technology enables me to revisit the pleasures of my youth, and for that, I love the technology.

Thanks to DVDs and downloads, and e-places like Amazon and Netflix, I can watch almost any movie at almost any time. And if I'm feeling frugal, or if a certain film is out of print, I can program my TiVo to record it on TCM and use my DVD burner to capture it forever.

As another aside, I love TiVo. I also love Turner Classic Movies. Oh, and I simply adore I-Tunes, because I-Tunes lets me spend $.99 on a song today that I spent $8.00 for in 1986 because I had to buy the whole cassette to get the one song I really wanted.

Yes, technology has made it possible for us to have whatever we want whenever we want it, all with little effort. And therein lies the core of my 2010 resolution. My lament about life's ease versus life's simplicity is about how our ability to have many of the things we want - often literally with the touch of a button - has dulled not those things, but the simple joy those things used to bring.

I don't love the Thin Man movies just because of the movies themselves; I love them because I remember stumbling across them on the Million Dollar Movie at two in the morning when I was a kid. That was special. So was finding obscure Italian horror films on the Saturday afternoon Creature Double Feature on a local UHF channel. (For those of you unfamiliar with UHF, Google it.) Now? That joy of discovery is gone. Why? Because I can just ... go get the movies whenever I want them.

So, too, is gone the joy of anticipation. If you were a kid at Christmas in the '70s and '80s, the broadcast schedule for the old Rankin/Bass productions of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and others like them, was burned on your brain, and if you missed an airing because you forgot or because your parents took you clothes shopping that night or because you were grounded, well, see ya next year, kid. Now? My daughters watch them on DVD, and they like them well enough, but there's no sparkle there, because watching them is not about being parked in front of a TV at 8:00 on a Thursday night in December; watching them is about pulling the discs off the shelf in the middle of June if they want to.

Also missing is the joy of hope. That kind of joy used to come with opening pack after pack of baseball cards - stale gum and all - hoping to get that Richie Hebner card to complete your Phillies team, or even going to a hobby shop to flip through countless binders to look for that one last card you needed to complete the whole set. Now? Just go to a website and have it shipped. Even I-Tunes sucks the joy out of hunting through bins of records or tapes or CDs in an effort to find that ONE tune that was the choice cut from the soundtrack of your youth.

And what about the joy of sharing that used to come when your sister visited you to look at photographs from that crazy party you both went to a few weeks prior? Sure, now you can look at pictures on Facebook as soon as the party is over, but it's hard to reminisce about an event that is only hours old, and it's not as much fun to point and laugh at a screen alone, and in ten years you won't visit your attic and happen across a shoebox full of Facebook and think back to the good old days.

My 2010 resolution is not about unplugging the internet, or hooking up the rabbit-ears (again, if you have to ask ...), or canceling the I-Tunes account. My resolution is about shifting the balance between Simple Joy and Get It Now. It's about doing a little more digging through the bins and a little less clicking of the mouse. It's about sometimes checking the television schedule instead of sometimes checking the shipping schedule. It's about risking the unknown instead of guaranteeing delivery. It's about sharing memories, not sharing URLs.

My 2010 resolution is about making sure that the things in my life are IN demand, not ON demand.