Staying Out Of View

Facebook is like gum on the bottom of your shoe--very, very hard to shed.  A long time ago I went on to Facebook, realized instantly it was not for me, but leaving was too hard to figure out for this naif, so I just let the thing go dormant.  In the years since then there have come Twitter of which I know nothing but the name, and a host of others, which I cannot even identify let alone describe.  My children and grandchildren all use Facebook and the rest of the so-called "social media," and I am thus barred from the family news, since it would never occur to most of them to enter into a personal one-on-one electronic conversation with someone.  It is actually extraordinary but I have almost no knowledge of my family's doing, compounded by the fact that we live all over the continent, and thus have no occasion to meet for lunch or coffee.  Recently a daughter emailed me to tell me of the pregnancy of my grandson's wife, and thus the birth of what will be my first great grandchild, a milestone of some note in the life of an elderly gent.  Interestingly enough, neither the grandson, nor his wife, nor his father, my son, thought to send me the news, that's how disconnected we are as a family. A granddaughter from another family whom I am helping by paying her college tuition sends me cheerful brief, oh, so very brief notes on her academic progress once a semester, never in any  way augmented by either her mother or father.  The background to her life at college is entirely opaque to me.  But in a way, my isolation is all my own doing. I do not want to present myself as a public profile, partly because I was raised to believe so strongly in the privacy of one's family.  We were, for instance, not supposed to visit with friends nor even telephone them on Sunday, not so much for religious reasons, but that one day a week was sacred for the family, and our privacy within our house, was not to be invaded.  Today in the press we read again and again about the dangers of public exposure on these electronic forms of communication, about the rants, the ugly epithets, the terrorizing hate, all from unidentifiable sources.  I suppose that I sensed this way back when I first encountered Facebook and recoiled from it.  I remember so well when I was a twenty five year old and my first wife died suddenly.  We were living in a small Massachusetts town to which we had moved only two days previous to her sudden death where the local newspaper routinely printed obituaries with information obtained from the local funeral homes.  One of the most agonizing and never to be forgotten consequences of this, as one might say, public exposure, was--in addition to the many, many letters of sympathy from my friends (yes, there was a time when pen and ink were the only thing available to the general public) and strangers moved by the plight of so young a fellow--were the incredible hate letter writers, psychopaths all, blaming me for the death, talking of hell, talking of just deserts, invoking every kind of imaginary sin and perversion to which I was imagined to be subject.  I have never forgotten this, my first and only inadvertent exposure to the general public.  "Le peuple, Madame," Necker was alleged to have said to Marie Antoinette, "c'est une bete."