After a very interesting catchup with my extended family members last night, I got up this morning at 5:00 AM. I opened all the windows and the front door to allow the cool breeze to enter the house. Deciding to make myself a cup of coffee, I poured it inside my new mug that Santa had delivered to me on Christmas after having it charged to my AMEX card ending with 9074. I had at least another two hours before the rest of the family woke up, so I decided to do what some of my friends on Facebook had started doing. That was going through all the friends I had and removing anyone who had made racist comments or hate speeches towards anything or anyone in particular.
Started with 309 friends. First I tackled the easy ones- family members. I have easily not met some of my family members for an extremely long time meaning over 25 years. So I was rather unsure what their opinions were on public social issues. After finally finishing that I decided to review my various friends from each country. Having been born in the minority community in Sri Lanka and now living in a minority community in Singapore it made sense to me to review friends from both Sri Lanka and Singapore. During this process I found many interesting posts from lot of my friends which I had missed before. This group was a long process as it was hard to keep my heart and mind together. This factor made going over everyone much more difficult but for sure made me understand every decision I made.
As someone who also lives and works in multiple countries, I have friends from all over the world on Facebook. Sometimes it was confusing to remember who was who at times. However, it was still fun to review all the posts. Some were in Spanish while others in Japanese but thanks to the wonderful creation of Translators it was quick and easy for me to read. Lots of anti Trump comments were thrown about from my American friends and other worrying comments on Brexit but these were simply just political views. Then I moved on to India, my all time favorite country (minus the cricket teamš).
By now the first family member had woken up and as usual it was my son. He dragged his feet over to me with a big smile on his face to come and give me a hug. I tried to entertain him for a few moments but he quickly became bored. When everything else failed he went into the room to wake up and disturb his sister as I countinued on my Facebook clean up.
I was nearly done and my mind had mixed feelings but I knew I had to finish what I started.
I am probably one of the luckiest people on Facebook. I have never had to witness any of my FB friends posting racist comments or sharing hate speeches. The majority of them support the views of one anotherās communities and are there to help each other.
At the end of all this I still have the exact same 309 friends that I began with. Life really has a lot to be grateful for including all of you.
