MIND YOUR BUSINESS

Getting carried away by the grandiosity of those who have all the answers for the global problems of human beings can cloud the most important daily focus of any single life. Social media amplifies this process, if you allow it to. It is the present-day version of daytime AM talk radio, which used to feed the agoraphobia of retired senior citizens. That radio format was the forerunner of Alex Jones' current internet presence. Absorbing the opinions of others while never formulating your own is intellectual suicide. 

I was raised by people who had known true poverty in The Great Depression (1929-1939). My father worked unloading oil tankers, barrel by barrel, after school for pennies. My mother started cleaning houses at 11 years old after school, also for pennies. Keeping their heads down was habitual by the time WWII disrupted their lives. Then they were forced by economics and patriotic pressure to join the communal war effort. My father, newly married, went off to Europe in the army. My mother, pregnant, went to work in a munitions factory, located on the other side of Boston from where she lived. Three changes on the transit system each way. 

My parents were just as tough as my grandparents, despite growing up with 20th century conveniences. They had known the kind of deprivation and hard work which teach postponed gratification. They had also learned to mind their own business while also being valued members of their actual community. Despite the revisionist view of FDR's socialism as intrusive communism, my parents did not receive any free handouts, ever. They succeeded at becoming financially independent and solvent by minding their own business and taking care of business for themselves, their parents, their siblings and their children.  

The false society found on social media is that, false. It is unsubstantial. Yet, it promotes the nosy gossip that makes life interesting for some and uncomfortable for others. The lives portrayed are fake. This is understood by all but the naive or mentally challenged. The outrage over politically incorrect or nonconformist views is also fake. How can you be outraged by the encapsulated opinion held by someone you don't really know? Yet this hasn't stopped evil actors from using social media to persecute some and destroy the reputations of others. 

Employers have quoted social media content as just cause for dismissal. How far from freedom is that? Why is it ever an employer's business what a person says or shows on a private, non-business, social media page? Yet employers have managed to pull off firing people for what they have posted on social media. 

Social media morality is no morality. How can a milieu which is based in superficial hypocrisy be used as a moral or ethical standard? Actually, it can, just as the country-club social network of the post-WWII era was used to enforce class-based behavior. Those 'standards' included WASP xenophobia based in ethnicity and race. Social media has flipped the paradigm to reflect the demographic shift. But the paradigm is not really different in most ways. Tribal exclusion is cool on social media. 

My parents' working-class generation had forged a functional social model in their communities. When we kids would start gossiping about a schoolmate's family at the supper table, my mother would quickly declare. "Mind your business." We knew what this meant. It taught us to consider our own behaviors toward our peers when they were present or absent. Out of this grew the roots of respect of the privacy boundaries of others. 

The other side of the model also taught us something. If we spoke of a fight as school, my father would inevitably say, "Well, did you go get a teacher?" If the answer was "No", his disapproval would be devastating. "Next time, get a teacher or help the smaller guy out." So, we learned that the observed misfortune of others in our social sphere was our business to do something about. 

Both sides of this model said clearly, "Don't be a useless critic or spectator in life. Make a real difference or shut up." 

"Mind your business." never meant "Be selfish." It was an exhortation to take care of our own patch of the world first. And those who were part of that patch in whatever circumstances deserved help and care, not unwarranted criticism or voyeuristic/exhibitionist exploitation. This is the opposite of social media's impact on society. Voyeuristic/exhibitionist exploitation is the essence of a lot of virtual friendship. Unwarranted criticism for simply holding a differing opinion is the fuel of social media grudge battles. 

Privacy in an overcrowded world will become extremely valuable and rare. I happen to believe that setting a personal boundary of privacy is everyone's business. That boundary creates the secure space from which a person confidently engages with the world. I think this also applies to families, communities, nations. This approach to life is under threat from social media and also from some growing political ideologies. Life without the ability to "Mind your business." has been brutally imposed and enforced in Nazi Germany, Soviet USSR and Maoist China. There are those who would now impose it globally in the name of Progress. This is a great deception.