The Berlin Wall is More Interesting than your Baby.
I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. In
exasperation and disgust, I have deactivated my account at least three times.
Each time I’m lured back by the fact that if one wants to know anything about
anyone in their life in the 21st century, you must be on it.
At any rate, each time I come back to Facebook, I whittle
down my friend list even more. This has ensured that I will no longer be greeted
by pictures of old boyfriends’ spawn, vacation pictures belonging to coworkers
I haven’t seen in years, and, my personal favorite, the placenta of a girl I
never even liked in high school. If that last one made you say “What the
fuck?!!?” in your head or (even better) out
loud, that’s a Good Thing because it means you have a shred of decency and
appropriateness.
So yet again, I’m back on “the Book”, and back to my love/hate
relationship with it. Now that I’m 30, Facebook has taken on a new role: it is
the conduit through which everyone I ever knew posts infinite numbers of
pictures of their children. I’m not a mom, and I swear I do try to understand
the life-changing, earth-shaking role that having your very own little person brings.
But I really struggle to understand the need to post pictures and videos of the
baby doing every possible thing imaginable. Less is no longer more. A picture
of the baby with the dog, in bed, in the car, in the stroller—wherever the baby
is, whatever it is doing, no matter how inconsequential, it gets dozens of
electronic ooos and awws.
In this new 30+ game, I cannot play. I have no baby, and
very quickly get bored with the baby pictures. I usually go through them, leave
a comment here or there. I do it because the parent is important to me, not because
I understand the need to share every moment of the baby’s life. This has, and
still does, sometimes lead me to believe that I am some sort of unfeeling cyborg
that finds babies uninteresting and weird looking. In this I have the good
company of Queen Victoria who, despite having 9 herself, notoriously hated babies.
She shunted them off to the royal nursery claiming they looked like frogs.
There. You learned something.
So as the world has babies, I recently posted pictures of my
“baby”—a trip to Europe with some of my students, 1+ years in the making. The
trip was an amazing whirlwind through Western Europe. As is my duty by the code
of Facebook, I posted a good number of pictures from this trip so friends and
family could share in the experience. It took HOURS to sort through the
pictures, choose the ones worth sharing, upload them, and caption them. Though
I am not a good photographer, I have always been very meticulous about organizing
and sharing pictures.
When I finished the task, I felt that gross “I’ve been at a computer
all day” feeling was justified in that I finally got to post pictures of
something really important to me. As I signed on over the following days, I was
excited to see what people would say about all these amazing places I took all
these young people to see.
Only…no one (save one person) said ANYTHING about the
pictures. I couldn’t believe it. I felt sad, hurt almost. Then, as is so often
the case, I became angry. Why didn’t
anyone comment on the pictures of the Berlin Wall? Of the Eiffel Tower sparkling
at night? Of an 800 year old cathedral? Of the row upon row of the young men buried
thousands of miles from home because their country told them to go to war? Are we so busying taking pictures of our kids,
“checking in” at the gym, and playing Candy Crush that we can’t pause to
consider places that are truly, actually, deeply powerful and meaningful? The
stories of all of these places are, at the very least, deserving of the fucking
“like” button.
If the power of the places wasn’t interesting enough, the
fact that it is really important and interesting to me should (I would have
hoped) gave people pause. So I end with my title and I’m sticking to it: The
Berlin Wall is More Interesting than your Baby.
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