Every few weeks I get an email from my father. It’s a chain email he sends to everyone on his list of contacts. The emails fall into two categories; God or politics. I think in the past year I have received two emails from my father that have been personal. One I’m not counting because it was a response to an email I sent him. I wouldn’t say my father and I aren’t close but we don’t communicate a lot and a lot of times when we do communicate it isn’t real.

The move I have done has made me do an assessment of all my belongings, even emails that I store. It shouldn’t surprise anyone I keep old emails. As many times as I’ve had people misrepresent themselves, saved emails have been a way of verifying and keeping people honest with me. However that is another story. Going over the emails my father has sent over the years has painted a picture of someone I don’t recognize. Look, I know the emails are chain emails, so they aren’t even his words, but the fact that he sends them out to people does give a bit of acceptance of the messages sent, even if he didn’t craft them.

Back in the early days of the Internet, this would have been around 1995, my father got into an email war with someone who happened to be part of someone else’s list. This was back in time when people didn’t have a good grasp of email and a lot of times would hit REPLY ALL and everyone on an email list would get a message. In any case, this guy and my father got into a four to six month email war about religion. It was like my father had to convert him to Jesus Christ and this guy couldn’t stop trying to tear down my father’s beliefs. In the end, the guy stopped responding to my father. Before the communication ended, I tried telling my father to stop sending the messages to someone who didn’t want to hear it. My father looked at me and told me he felt it was his obligation to try and show this man the light of God.

My father is a very good man. Of course I’m going to say that because he is my father. I wasn’t beaten up by him as a kid, I have no drama I can recall that would cause any mental breakdown caused by him. Even with my father being in the Navy during my formative years and deployed a lot, he kept in contact with phone calls, letters and when he was home he made sure to stay with his family. I would consider my father a good representation of what a father should be. He might not be perfect, but he works damn hard at being the best father he can.

The chain emails I get don’t represent my father. They are of an overly critical, overly liberal closed minded individual. I know my father and the political emails he sends out aren’t close to his actual position on politics. There was a chain email sent out at the beginning of the year which urged us to sign a petition against the radical anti-woman agenda Republicans were promoting. While I know my father is somewhat knowledgeable about politics, I couldn’t say if the position posted in the email was his personal feelings or just something he passed along for the greater good of the party line. Between the religious and political postings there are some contradictory themes sprinkled about. One thing I am aware of is people can change. When I saw my parents a few years ago I was shocked to see my father watched The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. I could tell by watching with him he was a fan of hers. Let’s just say for most of the years I have known my father he wasn’t a big fan of ‘the gays.’ I never heard him use the F word but he wasn’t conformable with anyone he suspected of being homosexual. Watching him watch and admire Rachel Maddow was interesting.

I would say for a lot of us we aren’t defined by the social media postings we make. I think a lot of us want to be accepted by whatever cliché we develop. We send out quotes that mean nothing, just a bunch of words that express a pop psychology message. We post memes or other short quips that are passed around by so many people it becomes a contest to see who can post it first. Some see themselves as activist for their causes and believe they are passionate and straightforward about their cause. Of course, once someone questions their belief their conviction degenerates into a flame war. Some people, once confronted a few times about their convictions, slow down or quit social media, leaving while trying to put on a brave face. My father isn’t the sum of his chain email posts because you can’t get the essence of a person with lines of code.

There are people I know who are jerks but I hang around them because I have known them for so long I have their good sides in my heart. They aren’t lines of code for me. I have enough respect for people that I can have them disagree on positions I have. I am strong enough to have people debate me on things. All I ask is that you listen to me in return. Some of my best friends right now are people no one would have guessed we would be friends. Some of my older friends from high school know I would take a bullet for them.

There are people I know now that I don’t trust. I see the people who connect with them online and I’ve seen these people in person and the online presence is a façade. Their real presence is a mask. If they were more honest about themselves maybe they will reach the summit they preach about so much but as things stand now they are nothing but empty shells spouting empty rhetoric to people clinging to false hopes. Too many people insist on quick fixes to complex problems. They create fake hope. That isn’t the way we should choose to live.