Enemies Online

There are two primary value-added functions of Facebook. First it allows a productive, real-time connection to people whom you’ve just recently been introduced to. It helps develop friends. Second it helps one reconnect with those long-lost friends from life’s previous chapters. Elementary schools, former clubs and towns where one used to live. All come back to life, bunched together into intertwining groups on Facebook.
What if, instead of a site for connecting with old friends, there was a sight for connecting with old enemies. It’s always been my opinion that the people I disliked most in the world were the ones who exhibited the qualities I most disliked in myself. My enemies are a motley collection of the worst of me. The arrogant, the selfish, the just plain stupid.
They say you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Presumably the primary reason for such an unpleasant choice would be so you could watch their every move, always prepared for them to strike, banking on proximity to give the edge to your early-warning system. But there’s another reason why you should keep your enemies close. Either they have hurt you, you have hurt them or you have hurt each other. An enemy knows things about you that your friends either do not or have chosen to overlook.
Most of the time I too prefer to overlook the tough and nasty things living inside me. I avoid confrontation with my demons. When I am wronged I hold it tight like my last lighted match. When I wrong I abandon the memory so effectively that it’s not long before I can honestly wonder why in the world that person is so hostile towards me. But in the interests of personal growth and development, this is poor strategy.
It would be better to be made to face all the difficult bits of one’s past; to confront full on your errors, and to share your own grievances. And here comes the big idea: www.enemybook.com. An online network where you connect with those who know you in a way your friends do not. A network for the sharing of grievances, the illumination of wrongs, the sharpening of criticism. The goal would not necessarily be to make friends out of enemies, though this may happen. The real point of such a site would be for me to understand how what I do and who I am affects the people around me. To identify those nasty spots in me and cut them out with laser-like precision. While it’s true you can learn much about a person by looking at their friends, I think a person can learn just as much about themselves by looking at their enemies.