I’ve had an interesting week on Facebook since I launched my Fully Present Better Human page. Since it is a public page, it is seen by anyone and everyone and apparently there are some older white men who came across my posting and felt compelled to attack the notion of encouraging people to be fully present better humans. They surfaced when I posted that Better Humans tell the truth. My comment accompanying the poster read, “The truth is the foundation for good decision making. Better humans value the truth and refuse to spread conspiracies, misinformation, speculation and lies. How do you find the truth these days?”
I was called a Marxist, a Socialist and a sellout. I was told I was pushing a mob narrative. I was rightly accused of being a Trump hater. And of course, one of them assumed I was in favor of murdering babies. They acted in tandem, agreeing with each other in their synchronized attack on my page. At one point, I wondered if these men actually knew each other and were a gang of bullies trolling Facebook for people to bully. They were clearly hostile. One blamed people like me for the culture wars and division in the country. One of them said he had done research on who I was, having read some of my writings, for which I thanked him. At the end, two of them summed up their remarks by telling me to be keep quiet about my ideas. Of course, I refused.
But one of the conversations ended on a positive note. The man had been a police officer who initially called me brainwashed and pointed to my support for inclusion and social justice as the root of the division in the nation. He’s the one who claimed to have read some of my writing. I explained that if advocating for inclusion rather than discrimination or justice as opposed to injustice was divisive then I hoped for more “divisive” people like me. It was when we disclosed our personal backgrounds, me as an educated black female and he as a police officer with PTSD that we finally came to an understanding. He stopped calling me names. We came to a common understanding that we both spent our lives in service to others both in our professional and private lives. Saturday morning, I noticed that he deleted most of his posts from the page and that what remains are my rebuttals.
It is interesting and a bit unsettling that grown white men feel so threatened by simple ideas to be better human beings in service to our planet and our society would invite such an attack. But it did. And I was more than ready to defend my position. I do admit that I spent a few minutes revisiting the basics of Marxism, Socialism, and Capitalism in the process. So, here’s where I landed.
I’m not a Marxist. A Marxist centers class warfare between capitalist business owners and workers to the eventual overthrow of capitalism in favor of communism or state-controlled production of goods and services and the elimination of private ownership and profits. I am a capitalist in favor of regulation that prevents the extreme exploitation of workers, politics, and the environment for the purpose of expanding profits. I don’t think the market economy can fully protect individuals and the environment from unscrupulous greedy business owners in the short-term, so regulation is necessary. And I do believe that we have allowed too much capitalist money to unduly influence our politics and policy making as well as our news media. I think our news media should be funded independently with public funds and not owned by wealthy businessmen like Rupert Murdock. However, when it comes to healthcare, criminal justice, infrastructure, and education I prefer to keep the profit incentive of capitalism out of the picture. So, in these sectors, I am more of a socialist. Socialism calls for the production and distribution of these services to be regulated by the community as a whole.
In the end, I’m grateful for the attacks this week. They lead to greater personal clarity on my positions, and I was able to articulate them in my rebuttals. These public arguments provide the opportunity for others to hear different sides to an issue. I avoid name-calling and insults, opting instead to respectfully state my position and my rationale. I’m a kind person by nature and I’m able to genuinely wish them well, although they seem to become even angrier by it. In the future, I will likely continue to engage with people who attack me on Facebook. That is their right. But it is also my right and I feel it is my responsibility to onlookers to defend my ideas and my right to voice my opinion. As a person striving to become a better human for a better world, I will never shrink away from advocating for what I believe is right and good.