Who are you following?

I’ve seen those bigshots all come and go

Been there myself and there’s one thing I know

You’ve got to choose your heroes, choose them well

They could be leading you straight into Hell

“Rock Love” by Utopia

I have been on something of an unfollowing spree for about a year now. Social media, I mean. At first, it became a keep-my-sanity necessity back in 2015 when a certain real estate magnate came down a certain escalator and masses of people lost their tiny little minds.

And that is not a one-sided statement. People on all shades of the political spectrum just lost it. I was more, shall we say, outspoken online back then, as were many of us. Which, of course, led to being called some pretty vile names.

At first I got offended and fired back. But, too slowly for sure, it dawned on me that the people unloading on me were, by and large, people I did not actually know in real life. Or, irl, as the kids say.

Back in the early, headier days of social media, I basically friended anyone who asked. And, given my gigs as both editorial director of a company that put out several magazines covering audio, lighting and video production for the live concert industry as well as being in a band that played pretty regularly around Southern Nevada and Northern Arizona, I had a lot of musicians and techs who wanted to connect. Most of them I had never met nor spoken to.

So I did some unfriending back then. But then, I took a long break from social media on a personal level. I had gone to work for Apple working in their Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Instagram feeds for 50-plus hours a week for five years and I just had no stomach for any kind of online back and forth for a long time. Years, in fact. I only came back when I had put out a record (which I may have mentioned a time or 100) and needed a way to let people know about it.

But this time I stayed out of the fray. (At least I did for a long time. I must confess however that I am weak and have at least put my toes on the outside edge of the line a time or three in the past few years.) Anyway, for a while there, it looked like most people I knew had calmed down.

Until a year ago last Saturday.

I don’t care who you voted for or what political position you support. Really, I just don’t give a poop. Different strokes for different folks (and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby, to quote Sly.) But when I saw people I was still connected to online commiserating about the poor aim of a disturbed kid who had tried to kill a candidate and former president and injured multiple people and killed one in the process? The “Dude, you had one job” statements? Or the “I wish this guy had been trained by the Seals” crap?

Really? That is acceptable? It’s a joke? Well, it’s not funny.

And so I went on a real spree. I started by doing the same unfriending thing I had done in 2015. But then I discovered a different way. I could stay loosely connected to people and just unfollow them and not have to see their vile rantings.

And I got just flat-out trigger-happy with that Unfollow command. (Which is maybe a bad metaphor here but, you know…)

I unfollowed hundreds of people. If anyone in my feed was going on an unhinged rant about anything or anyone regardless of which side they were on politically or, really any consideration of subject matter at all… I just smashed that Unfollow button. And, you know what, social media got actually kinda, sorta, almost pleasant again.

But, unlike most folks out there, I actually have really good friends, people that I care deeply about, on both sides of the great Blue/Red divide. I have written before about having friends who were self-described communists as well as friends who were self-described right-wing gun nuts. And, more than once, we were all in the same band at the same time. And we loved each other even though we saw the world very differently.

But those days ended some time ago now. Too many folks wear their status of not knowing anyone “on the other side’ as a weird badge of honor.

And note, that I just unfollowed. I stayed connected and sent birthday greetings and all that stuff. (Via text, never via social channels because that is just too easy and feels false somehow. I mean, if all you did was hit a button next to a person’s name when prompted that they had a birthday coming up and you let the platform send out a pre-written, generic message with a predetermined set of emoji, does that really count? It does not in my world.) I didn’t totally isolate, I just chose not to be subjected to dumb rantings and that went equally for my right-wing friends and the many people I love on the left.

I made a few exceptions. You see, like that earlier unfriending spree, I realized that most of the people having unhinged rants were people I really had no connection to irl. But there are still a few. People I love dearly. Some of them I agree with in basic “how the world works” terms and some I most definitely do not see eye-to-eye with. And some of them occasionally go on unhinged rants.

It is a small list. Maybe a dozen folks, tops. If they start to get out of hand on some kind of streak, I have been known to silence them for 30 days while they cool down. A kind of an “attention timeout.”

But this weekend I unfollowed someone I know really well. Someone I have done a few gigs with and hung out with at more than a few others. The breaking point?

They called for violence against someone they disagree with politically because this person gave a very long speech trying to delay an action the speaker was opposed to. See the common thread here? If my friend had just said that the speaker was a moron and was wasting time, that would have been one thing. But saying they would pay money to watch someone “curbstomp him” was a bridge too far.

We are living in, I sincerely believe, a dangerous and fraught time. And at some point, soon, I fear, someone is going to take matters into their own hands and people are going to die. Possibly a lot of people.

And I don’t want to be part of that on any level. So, my friend… I no longer see anything they talk about. Not even the cool and funny stuff.

To quote Todd again ( like the song lyric up top), “Get thee behind me, Satan.”