A few weeks ago, I logged onto Facebook and received one of those annoying messages, alerting me that old so-and-so, a person I haven’t seen for years, was now on Facebook and maybe I would like to be his friend. So, being the nice guy that I am, I sent him a Friend invitation. Why not, it’s good to have friends, right?
Well, last night, three weeks after I asked this guy to be my Friend, he finally, grudgingly accepted. And I thought why did it take him three weeks? Was he on vacation all that time, or did he really need to think about it? I mean jeez, it’s only Facebook, what’s the big deal?
So then I asked myself: what is a friend, anyway? We go through life, people come, people go, and how does one define a friend? Is it someone you met one time, or maybe had a passing correspondence with years ago, and haven’t heard from since? Are they still your friend?
How about someone you’d drink a beer with on a Saturday night at the local pub? That could be a lot of people. Is it just the guy sitting next to you, or is it everyone at the bar? If they bought me a beer, they would definitely be my friend, at least until the next day, but this doesn’t mean I would invite them to Facebook.
How about relatives? They should all be friends, right? I mean, we all share the same parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, whatever, so does that make us friends? It might stack the deck in the favor of friendship, but I’m afraid there are no guarantees here, as I have one or two relatives – you know who you are – that I wouldn’t stop to help change a tire if they were stranded on the side of a deserted highway in a snowstorm. Let them freeze, I say.
Is a friend someone you would pull from a burning building? I think I would pull most anyone out of a burning building – maybe not Louis Farrakhan – but everyone else I would help, so does that make the majority of the human race my friend? If you did pull someone from a burning building, they would certainly be your friend afterwards, assuming you didn’t break their arm or permanently damage them somehow in the process.
Have you ever noticed that when someone dies, suddenly they have more friends than they ever did while they were living? People who haven’t been around for decades will appear at the gravesite, professing to be that person’s dear friend, and oh how I miss him. Why do you have more friends after you die than while you’re still living?
This is sort of how Facebook makes me feel. People I haven’t seen for thirty years, people who don’t even know me anymore, now profess to be my friend. But I suppose I’ll accept their invitations. It will make it easier to send for my wife to send out funeral invitations when the big day comes.