The Sky is Falling

None of my friends are voting for Obama. None of my REAL friends, that is.

But my Facebook friends? Well, that’s a different story.

While in real life, you tend to be friends with people who think like you and share your values, on Facebook, many of us tentatively explore friends of another stripe, friends who care about different things.

That should be okay. Most of us like to think we are tolerant of others.

But with the threat of nuclear war hanging like a cloud over my life and the lives of my children, it’s NOT okay.

Not at all.

So as my friends talk about the wonderful Mr. Hope and Change, I begin to wonder if by agreeing to even these most tenuous of ties, brought to us by the wonders of social networking, I’m not enabling these people to annihilate me, my family, and in fact, the 6 million Jews that today comprise the Jewish population of Eretz Israel?

We’re not supposed to say such things.

My “cup half full” friends will respond that Israel will never let it happen. That GOD will never let it happen.

But I’m not listening, because the threat is more than enough. The fact that ANYONE, ANYWHERE, threatens my family and my people, should be taken seriously. And if my American friends blow off my concerns, and vote for Obama no matter what, then why the Hell are we still friends?

Obama’s guy, Martin Dempsey, and therefore by extension THEIR guy, talks about refusing to be “complicit” in how Israel defends itself against Iran. As a result, I begin to feel complicit myself, by agreeing to be friends with Americans, both Jews and otherwise.

If we’re poised at the edge of a nuclear Holocaust and my “friends” don’t do their part to stop it from happening with their votes and I trade cutesy comments with them and otherwise don’t react, doesn’t that make me guilty by association?

These friends have told me outright: It’s not that they don’t care about Israel. It’s that they care about domestic issues. They care about abortion. They care about gay marriage. Iran threatening Israel with a nuclear bomb is just not a priority issue for them, because it’s not an AMERICAN issue.

They don’t care that their president could stop Iran with WORDS, but refuses to do so. They don’t care that he LEAKS Israel’s military secrets. They don’t care that he has his guy make statements that give Iran a very clear message: “We won’t attack you. And we won’t help Israel defend itself.”

So at what point do I begin to feel a bit like Martin Dempsey, “complicit,” by my choice of friendships online—by being the indulgent loving “friend” who doesn’t let politics get in the way of “friendship?”

If, God forbid, the worst were to happen, I wonder how those “friends” will feel after the fact. Will they say, “Never again,” and then go on talking about abortion and gay marriage? At what point will they be willing to diagnose the events and see how they were COMPLICIT—how they played their own part?

And how I played the Chicken Little to whom they would not listen?