Roses are red. Violets are blue. Facebook has thrown up. I think I might too.

I should say upfront, I'm not typically a Valentine's Day hater. More power to the anti-Vday folks who get together every February 14 to... I don't know what exactly, but that's just not my thing.

However.

Facebook is a bit of a pressure cooker---things get intensified because everyone is posting about the same thing nonstop. When this happens, whether it be because of the latest Evangelical controversy or some political scandal, the World Wide Web gets a little claustrophobic for me, and I have to leave.

Sadly, this is how I feel about Facebook on Valentine's Day.

Again, I'm not a romance hater. I'm a fan of love. I especially enjoy reading about my friends' happiness in love, even when I'm flying solo, which I admit might be a bit unusual, but I feel particularly strongly about the importance of public, or at least communal, expressions of love and affection and appreciation for your awesome SO. Society needs good love stories; we need examples of healthy relationships and how to navigate them in both public and private (communal and personal) spaces.

Most of the time---because I have super great friends who are some of the best people on the planet---I get a healthy dose of My-Husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/fiance-Is-The-Best! posts. These sorts of posts pop up on anniversaries and birthdays and completely out of the blue because, again, I have stellar friends who have equally stellar SOs.

This is a good thing. But it's also nice and spread out. On Valentine's Day, it's like it's everyone's anniversary on the same day. My feed is flooded with Vday posts, even from the pages I follow, so that everyone from that girl I knew in high school to NPR is posting about romance. All. Day. Sometimes all weekend.

In addition to just being obnoxious (to a good number of the attached as well as the unattached) because it's ubiquitous, Valentine's Day is already a day in which people can feel especially lonely, where the loneliness they already feel from time to time is magnified and intensified. Now add social media to the mix and that intensity is compounded even further.

So, I'm going to make a request that I normally wouldn't make. Please think twice before gushing to the World Wide Web about the sweet, romantic things your super-rad SO did for you on Valentine's Day. Maybe save it for birthdays and anniversaries and miscellaneous moments of love.

And don't forget your single friends. Let them know you love them too. Send a card or a text or an Amazon gift card. And maybe not just on Valentine's Day and birthdays, but just because.

GOD HATES OBAMA AND CHRISTIANS SHOULD TOO

I was initially going to write this post about those email forwards turned Facebook memes, their malicious deceptiveness, and the role they play in too many well-intentioned Christians' daily social networking liturgy. You know what I'm talking about. They're half truths disguised as completely true stories about politicians, or touching (but still only partly true) stories about a family or individual 'victimized' by liberal policies. They're wolves in sheep's clothing. And they spread like wildfire, in part because they're half true. (Or in some cases, as with the example below, almost completely made up.)

But this landed in my lap this afternoon, and I thought I'd shift gears slightly.

This still lands in the category of a Facebook meme propagated by ultra-conservative groups, but it lacks the compelling narrative. What makes this kind of thing attractive is it's one-liner, black-and-white pith. It's cheeky; it's inflammatory; it's simple. And American Evangelicals love these sorts of things for all of those reasons. This is baffling to me.

We must beware of deceptively simple arguments such as this. We are called by Christ to be innocent as doves and shrewd as serpents (Mt 10). We must stop allowing ourselves to be duped. We must repent from being a part of spreading these lies--even if by being silent--and turn to fight against them instead, for they are a great harm to the church.

The especial, malicious irony of the above image is that it was posted by one of those harmful "Christian" Facebook groups mere hours after Israel bestowed their highest honor upon President Obama, thanking him for his "tireless work to make Israel strong."

President Peres went on to say, "Your presidency has given the close ties between Israel and the United States a new height. A sense of intimacy. A vision for the future." (Read the full transcript or watch the video here.)

Dearest brothers and sisters in Christ, stop forwarding these emails. Stop liking and sharing these Facebook photos. These memes are poisonous. They are often intentionally deceptive, and there is nothing more unChristian. We are supposed to spread the cure, not the poison.

4 Ways to Misuse Your Facebook Status

1 - Updating your status with something that makes you look illiterate.

The status is obviously made to create a complete sentence, still, some people's statuses say something like:

Billy BOOMER SOONER!!

or

Jessica is I am hungry

A nicely placed hyphen (-) would take care of a lot of this, for example:

Adam Jones - Go Cowboys!

2 - Telling people when you are not home so they can rob you.

I see way too many status updates that are just begging someone to come along and steal their stuff.

Cindy is not home and will not be home for hours.

Rob will be out of the country for the next three weeks and his house will be empty. And, sometimes he forgets to shut the door all the way lol.

These sound like exaggerations but people really do things like this and I wonder if I am the only person who thinks that the "It Takes a Thief" guys could do a special TV show about Facebook.


3 - Telling people when they can stalk you.

This one is horrifying and quite serious. Every now and then a single lady tells everyone that she is weak and alone.

Jennifer is alone with her cat all night.

Stephanie is about to take a shower.

Someday, I fear there will be a very regrettable infraction of privacy due to careless Facebook tweeting, it could be a serious problem.


4 - Updating your status every five minutes

We all know at least one person who does this. You befriend them and suddenly your Facebook page looks like this:

John is getting dressed.

John is putting on his socks.

Mary is ready the first day at her new job.

John is sipping his coffee.

John noticed a man walking a dog and thought the dog looked funny.

John is leaving his house.

John is going back inside because he forgot something.

The interesting updates that you use to keep up with your friends are suddenly drowning in someone's narcissistic fantasy. Those friends don't stay on my home page for long. Trust me, no one wants Facebook.com to be synonymous with your twitter page.

OK, that's all for now. Any unforgivable uses of Facebook/MySpace you want to report?