Alan Tegel
2 min readFeb 13, 2021

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What you did was the best thing. Unfriend/unfollow/ or even block.

Why block? It activates a setup which purges all connections between the two of you, and after a period of time you can unblock, or you can wait until he notices.

As a former republican and a guy that has the ability to dig deep into layers and put the pieces together, my strength can also be my greatest weakness.

The thing is I am not full of myself, and even when I was hyped up on the full infotainment drug of politics, I would read from both the NYTimes and WSJ, I would read Mother Jones and infowars. I hope you see the difference.

Then aftrer I joined groups to maintain perspective, I noticed people attacking one another and the final straw was when I started to post a response (neutralish) and got called onto a 911 call with a European carrier for an hour. I went back fixed typos and hit enter.

Well folks took my neutral comment which came after a pretty awful put down of a person as complicit. I responded in kind told people to adult up and not be nasty and deported myself.

At that point I bowed out across the board, and shifted to news and then slowly interacted with people on their pages on politics (versus groups). When people went nasty, I took it to a therapist whose response was "block".

Folks got offended as I did the 7 day or 30 day thing and moved on.

So being from Texas now, I support three local newspapers and get the Dallas Morning News electronically. That is my news pipe.

Why the share? Social Media holds zero value at best for anything political or news related.

But why did I make the change? My wife hated the political mumblings and how it made me as a person, and I took the time to figure that out and nuked the source and ripped it out.

He needs to do the same if he wishes to maintain a relationship. Don't get me wrong both sides politically use peoples fears to control them, the question is controlling the fear beast within.

Something he is failing epically at.

I will say the benefit in doing this trek, is when I attacked my final and big demons (and even lost from Nov-Jan). I picked myself up and moved forward and onward, and the richness it gave me was priceless.

My comment to him / advice would be:

Do you know what is sexy AF and "manly" in the traditional sense? Taking your inner fears and not bowing to them and giving into them and empowering others to be bad and awful.

You know what makes you a real man not that gender should matter, being mindful and using facts to make decisions and living with empathy and sympathy for your partner, family, and friends.

You can either love people or hate people, there is no in between ,and unless a person directly implements a cardinal sin against you, one has no facts to base hate, just fears ...

I wish you well and be well!

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Alan Tegel

Lover of people, Texas Feminist Liberal Democrat, Horse Farm, High Tech Gadget ENFP Guy, and someone who appreciates the struggle of women and wants to help.