OK so where was I? I feel like I've closed the chapter, to some degree. I was getting obsessive about the Uncensored Site; I was getting notifications every ten minutes, whenever someone posted, and I was checking them whenever they came in. And they were an onslaught of anti-AOC memes (calling her stupid), or, general pro-wall, anti-immigration kinds of things. The other site, the Community site, is a little more controlled - no politics, less gossip, etc.
I felt like they knew I was watching, and they probably did. Someone complained about one of their posts, and I felt like saying, "Wasn't me!" True, I never complained about anything, but I did check in obsessively. I felt like it was the neighborhood bar, where anyone could say anything, and I was hearing the most rustic of what my neighbors felt like saying. And they didn't hold back; feeling like they were around their friends, they pretty much let loose on whatever they wanted. The pro-Trump stuff was pretty typical propaganda, I felt. They have to work hard to convince themselves that AOC is dumb, for example. So they do. It's what they do.
But the scandal that tipped the scale was when the moderator himself, J.C., was involved in some kind of altercation involving a neighbor and someone parking on his land in the inclement weather, or perhaps blocking him. i'm not sure what happened. But he disappeared from the site for a while, then came back trying to sell something (as if, trying to raise legal fees, or whatever). This is too much, I thought. I have to stop checking in. And I did; I turned off notifications. I still check once in a while; I can't resist. But now I get all the posts at once. An entire week, all bundled up in a single shot.
Meanwhile, I'd found another site; this one was for word geeks. People write in asking about the origin of various idioms and expressions, or they ask about other language-related questions. Ironically, much as I love the commenters on this site (called "A Way With Words"), they too devolved into name-calling. It happened in a post about words that had been "skunked," which was something I never quite got a handle on, but in the discussion about "irregardless," and whether or not it was a word, one commenter called another a "pompous skunk." And then I knew, this is just a characteristic of social media. Even the most intellectual thinkers can get angry when someone even appears to attack them. It happens to everyone. It's quite frequent. As my wife has said, "Never read the comments."
The sites carry on. The Uncensored site had to change its name to "Cloudcroft 700 Club," which to me is confusing as it's an indirect reference to Pat Robertson, and says nothing about being uncensored. One has to read into it to notice that 1) it's very political; 2) it's very pro-Trump; 3) it's very freewheeling in the degree to which people can be aggressive toward you if for any reason they don't agree with you. The moderator himself doesn't see a problem with that, though, to his credit, he has said that he also doesn't mind a few "libs" on there as long as they behave. I think they would act that way if we met them too. I think it's like Texas: what they consider "lib" would be anyone to the left of, say, Cruz. And they've got the memes to back it up.
