Taking a Side

 

Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash

Several friends and acquaintances have applied varying degrees of pressure on me to state an opinion about the Israeli-Gaza conflict raging in the Middle East. I have steadfastly refused to do so. You see, my Visa bill is due, and the religious, Israeli, Zionist, Hamas, Palestinian, Muslim, and  Judaic conflict over there pales in comparison to the immediate consequences of my missing a credit card payment.

Then, too, there is the pesky issue of the sacred texts ordering both sides to kill me. Me. The Bible followed by Judaism (as well as Christianity) demands in the book of Chronicles ¹ that I be put to death, along with my male and female, young and old fellow unbelievers.

While both religions (and their Christian counterpart) are religions built on hate, the Quran makes Islam a hazardous belief system to me and mine. Believers there are instructed if they encounter me in a fight they are to kill me or take me captive and ransom me. ² Of course, the fight the surah speaks of is to be taken to me from the believer. I do not start those kinds of finds. What if I were killed? What would my Visa card provider say about my credit rating then? Sorry, you faithful, That will be your fight, not mine.

I have long argued that when the WWII allies took a large swath of land away from the Palestinians to give it to the Jews as a form of reparations for the Holocaust and to fulfill the promise of the colonial British Balfour Declaration, they could have given Wyoming to them. Or, what the hell, New Jersey? I am not without empathy for the plight of people who have lost their homelands. Regardless of my sympathy for the Palestinians, I cannot back a side in a conflict when all sides seek my extermination.

Unless one side wishes to help with my Visa bill….

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¹ 2 Chronicles 15:12-13

² Surah 47:4

Leaving Social Media

 

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

--Mark Twain 

Michael was still smarting from falling for a scam involving an email claiming excessive activity on his credit card when he told me that Facebook had locked his account for a short time due to his violation of Facebook’s Community Standards.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. They don’t tell you the offense is, only that it violated community standards.”

Wait. Drug dealers, loan sharks, and bookies have better respect for their customers than that. That is the kind of institutional arrogance a prison guard has over his inmate, not the attitude we would expect from a business toward its customers. Facebook pages make a tremendous amount of money from the data gleaned there. To treat those members like minions beholden to you demonstrates a hubris that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the already corrupt business world.

But the story isn’t about Facebook’s failure at human decency. The issue goes deeper. Much deeper.

You see, a large but unknown number of people whose access to their Facebook feed has faced restrictions, will live out the limit to access and continue as before. Facebook faces no consequences for its algorithmic arrogance.

On my friend’s recounting of his Facebook offense, I thought If Facebook ever restricted my account over a non-specific charge, that would mark the end of my relationship with Zuckerberg & Co.

Well, it did happen to me.

Several months ago, I had two Facebook accounts: one, a tame mini blog for keeping in touch with friends and family, and another, a firebrand in-your-face political partisan rag. Over time, I tired of the partisan wrangle. I was arguing with people who appeared to have struggled to complete their eighth-grade education. Winning was not fulfilling. I closed that account and turned the keeping-up-with-family page into a display of literary memes and links to bookish articles.

I committed the Community Standards sin in those displays of the love of books and was locked out of usual activity for 24 hours. I was told I could find the nature of my offense by following an arcane regimen of nested menus, but they didn’t work. They called for me to navigate to something called “Account Quality” which, guided by my limited computer tech skills, I found does not exist. So, I closed the Facebook account.

I’m only one of millions of Facebook users, so my little protest won’t make a blip on the consumer trend to obsequious fealty to the mega-corporate model, but I can only hope that, over time, others will follow in ever-growing numbers.

Michael’s gullibility will, I’m sure, lead him into another scam. Social media has conditioned him into the victim mindset.

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