Who are all these people?

I awoke this morning to the gentle sound of rain on the hull of Deck 15 and the gentle vibration of my Android smart watch reminding me that it was a friend's birthday.  I looked at the name of my 'friend' and thought, 'who the fuck is this person?'  I looked at his profile.  Ah.  He's someone I met once on a trip to a bit of my past, or someone who had seen my comment on a friends Facebook post and had sent me a friend request, or I had done the same to him, and we had 'liked' each other's posts for a few days and  then had pretty much forgotten about each other.  So, I was glad to be reminded of him, and I sent him a birthday greeting. He's one of the 2.7 billion people on Facebook.  That's about half the world's population.

Like many people, I am often disgusted by Facebook.  It shows me that people are often mean and ignorant.  It claims to be a platform for free speech but it censors folks whose outlooks on the world are different from what is fashionable in Menlo Park.  But those factors that make me disgusted with Facebook are probably its greatest strength.  I already know that folks like their grandkids and cats and think they're good cooks.  (Yup.  I know that's an ambiguous pronoun, because some folks think they are themselves  good cooks, some people like their grandkids' cooking, and some folks show their cats as chefs.)  What is easy to forget is that there is a huge variety of outlooks among the 2.7 billion people on Facebook, and that's just half of us.  Censoring those who disagree with Menlo Park or with me is not going to be helpful if we are to live more peacefully.  Understanding them, and remembering that even the ones who don't smoke the same cigarettes as me still love their grandchildren and cats might.

So, here's to the mean ones, the stupid ones, the ones who aren't so enlightened as I and my friends who agree with me 98% of the time.  May we be reminded whether we like it or not that we are all planet mates, and may we all be patient with one another until we all become enlightened and use the Android operating system.