Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now?

 Desperate times. This would seem to call for desperate measures. 

For the past seven years, I've been bouncing around the online water cooler called Twitter. You know, the blue bird and the wide variety of opinions. And the cat videos. I tend to show up for the many and wide, but stay for the cat videos. Seven years ago, I showed up at the mild behest of my school district hoping to spread the good word about things as "the tech guy." As it turned out, there was a lot of fun stuff to occupy my time that was not strictly work-related. There was that whole 2016 election and the four years of despicableness that followed, culminating in the insurrection of January sixth. 

For those years, Twitter was a place I could go to argue and agree in quick bursts with those whose politcs were different and the same as mine. There seemed to be a free-flowing exchange of ideas, even if no one's mind was changed. Somewhere in there, I started distrbuting this blog as part of my feed, and occasionally someone would find it and make a comment or complaint. Twitter was a place where I could come and hang out with like-minded individuals and feel good about the clubhouse atmosphere. It was a place where I could go to unwind online.

Then Elon Musk spent forty-four billion dollars so that he could own something else. He bought Twitter. It only took a few days for the Muskiness to descend into my happy place. Insisting that he was all about transparency and fee speech, he started inserting himself into the narrative. And my timeline. Then he reinstated the former game show host and twice impeached "president's" previouisly suspended account. And started letting some of those other folks who had made stuff up and lied about Covid and election results back into the Twitterverse. Elon's club. Elon's rules. 

Suddenly I started finding all sorts of people I didn't want to see were waiting for me to make their inane racist, homophobic, antisemetic and categorically unhealthy viewpoints. Sure, I could click on past, but that wasn't the reason I was there. Into the middle of my seventies nostalgia and bleeding heart sensibilities dropped Marjorie Taylor Greene and any number of conpiracy nimrods who would like to see the Constitution that they revere so mightily suspended so that their favorite spray tan victim can be declared "president" again. 

In this new environment, I feel challenged and annoyed. I don't feel affirmed or encouraged. I no longer seem to have control over the volume knob. Looking for friends that I used to know I find instead reminders of all the things that I am trying to forget. I understand that I could continue to click away from the noise. I understand that this could be the place where I make my principled stand. I understand that despereate times call for desperate measures. 

Maybe I'm not that desperate.