There is a both a good side and bad side to Facebook.
On the one hand, you have this amazing opportunity to catch up with old schoolmates you haven’t even thought about in decades, let alone seen them. Memories of birthday parties, school functions, not to mention plays and concerts (if you were a music/drama geek like me) flow back like ice water poured on your head. It’s heartwarming to see these people you knew as a kid now raising their own kids and see where they ended up in life, career, and location.
The bad side is that there are also people you don’t want to see. Being a music/drama geek, I was ripe for ridicule. Growing up I was the one picked last in gym, who got shoved into lockers, whose chair got pulled from under him in the cafeteria, who got teased by the girls sitting in front of him who were getting D’s but didn’t care. All for the amusement of those kids who knew they were big enough and strong enough and “cool” enough to get away with it.
What was worse was when some of the parents were just as cruel as their children. And so it came as no surprise that when the school bully’s father ends up being your soccer coach, he’s just as much of a bastard to you as his son is.
So how do you respond when you deal with a bully—or an entire bully family—as I did as a child? Well, naturally, you wish the worst upon such people. You hope that those kids who made your life a living hell grow up to suffer a living hell of their own. After all, they can’t be too intelligent to begin with, so how far can they go in the academic or business world? Bullies are generally the kids who’ve already figured out by the time they’re in junior high that their life journey will be taking them no further than the fryer at the McDonalds, right? The ones who are in their 30’s and still single, or who have gone through a bitter divorce because their ex just couldn’t live with their temper anymore.?
But that didn’t happen to this guy. There I was innocently skimming the infinite pages of Facebook when, bam, there he was. And you know what? He was successful. Very successful. Huge house, huge pool, fast cars, his own business, and (seemingly) a beautiful family. Sure, you might be thinking, but does all that wealth really mean he’s happy? All the posted pictures seem to point that way. I can’t imagine that the smiles in those photos can all have been faked.
Here's the funny thing: Reading this guy's posts on the walls of our would-be mutual friends, I discover that he's actually warm and endearing, i.e., like a decent human being. So that gets me thinking: Maybe he turned out nice after all. A lot of people who are jerks as kids eventually grow up, right? Or, could I have just been overreacting as an insecure, sensitive and hopelessly unathletic child?
Looking into the eyes of someone who was a real bastard to me during my childhood, and into the eyes of his bully coach father who now smiles in pictures from his grandchildren’s bar mitzvah’s … it’s hard to know for sure.
There is a both a good side and bad side to Facebook.
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