Saturday, August 29, 2009

New Blog of the Week

You know how Facebook can be a fabulous tool for us old farts who want to reconnect with the other old farts from high school?

What's been interesting to me in that whole process is seeing how people have developed in regard to politics and religion. Now, the little village in which we grew up was in the southern tip of a northern state that bordered a southern state (got that?), and for all intents and purposes, we wuz suthnahs with hillbilly accents, rebel flags, and King James Bibles to thump one another with on Sundays before we left church for Mama's fried chicken and homemade mashed taters.

Most of us were good kids who didn't get in much trouble, and the ones who did probably weren't all that bad compared to the rest of the trouble-makers in the world.

Come graduation, most everyone fled the area, some to quickly return, some to straggle back years later, some to leave for good.

If it weren't for Facebook, I daresay I'd have never reconnected with any of them.

Now, looking back on the personalities of some of these kids, I'd expected that a lot would have grown up to be pretty conservative in nature, profess Christian ideals without proselytizing, and be registered Republicans. But I'm more than shocked at the number who left the area to become missionaries, and the ones who stayed but do some variation of preaching to the masses through their status updates. This is why the Creator (of facebook) invented the "Hide" option.

But every so often, I find myself pleasantly surprised by the discovery of a former schoolmate who followed where his questions led, researching and thinking and thinking and researching until he came to the realization that we'd all been duped.

He is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting people to come out of our school in decades...and he finally started a blog.

4 comments:

Wendy said...

I stay away from people I went to highschool with as much as possible on Facebook! We don't have a whole bunch of religious crazies in Massachusetts or anything like that. Buuuut most of the people I went to school with were complete assholes. So, ya know, no interest in "reconnecting" there. LOL

But this guy you found... Wanting to smell. That gave me a chuckle.

Bleu said...

There were very few assholes at my school. Seriously! I'm really glad to be in touch with the majority of them.

Of course, that was decades ago, and we were in a small town, and all our parents knew one another, so maybe that had something to do with it. There were a couple of people who were not so nice, but I can only really think of one of them right now who I would describe as a bully, and I don't think she's on Facebook anyway. :D

Kelli said...

I love Facebook for the ability to reconnect. I hate it for people sharing their religious/political beliefs. Isn't there a saying about not talking about politics, religion or money amongst friends? I think it creates bad feelings about things you would probably not discuss face to face.

Bleu said...

I usually like discussing religion and politics (never money) with some friends, but it seems things go better if we are of like minds. I don't even mind when people share a political or religious idea on facebook; sometimes it leads to great discussions. The ones that annoy me (and I don't know why) are of the "woke up and am thankful for the dewdrops jesus put on the roses just for my enjoyment" variety. I can't really put my finger on why it annoys me so.