Heart of Lincoln Land

I’ve just never gotten along with Facebook.

The start of the rocky relationship began 3 months ago, when I was pushed into creating an account just because everybody else was doing it, and because everybody else thought it would be a good way to showcase my T-shirts.

Right from the start, Facebook decided that its UI didn’t want to work the same as other website’s UIs. It presented ridiculous choices for the type of my “fan page”. Is it an “online store”? “Products”? Can’t I just enter in “T-shirts”? It didn’t even call them “fan pages”, even though they have a button that says “become a fan”, and they term their members “fans”. It called it “create a page for my business”.

I fought Facebook and eventually managed to create my personal page and fan page. Except I couldn’t find them. You’d think there’d be a list of all the pages I’ve created, so I could click on which one I wanted to post on. Except I couldn’t find that anywhere. I couldn’t even find anything that said “pages”. I went searching for a little “help” link. I eventually found it, but Facebook’s lackluster help section didn’t help me at all.

So I resorted to Google. It said that I should have a little “f” icon on the little taskbar Facebook gave me. (The sheer ridiculousness of using a “taskbar” inside a browser on a website made me laugh and cry at the same time.) Except Facebook decided that I shouldn’t have a little “f” icon. So I gave up, and eventually “deactivated” my account in frustration. (Apparently Facebook is kind of like the Hotel California – you can’t leave, only “deactivate”.) I told Facebook their UI sucks as my reason for deactivating. They said they’d look into my complaint, but they never did.

About a week later I decided to see if I could have a better relationship with Facebook. So I reactivated my account. I eventually found I could access my pages by clicking on the little “Create an Ad” link. Oh, how intuitive – you want to get me to buy an ad before I can even do anything!

Then Facebook decided I needed to have an identity crisis. I didn’t know which identity (personal or business) I was posting as when I posted something on one of my pages. It didn’t make any sense – shouldn’t I be able to choose which identity to post as? Apparently Facebook didn’t want to let me!

All the while, I was constantly encountering bugs and inconsistent UI behavior. Sometimes something would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Deleting my profile picture didn’t mean “delete” – it just meant it got saved in an album somewhere else, and I had to go delete them there. To “like” something, sometimes I had to hit the button twice. Sometimes it wouldn’t upload pictures properly. Sometimes it would just crash. It was also slow. It reminded me of Windows 95 running on a 486 with 4 megabytes of RAM.

Eventually, Facebook crashed big time. It locked up my browser tab, and I couldn’t log out. I closed the Facebook tab, and I couldn’t log back in again. I waited awhile, and it let me log in, but it gave me a “page not found” error. What the… ? All my work setting up this thing was lost for nothing!

I heard reports of pages disappearing and reappearing before, so I Googled the problem. I figured out you might be able to get it to work by using https:// instead of http:// in the URL. So I did, and it worked. However, this meant that for every internal Facebook link I clicked on, I had to copy and paste the URL, and put that little “s” in, because Facebook links are http://. Annoying. Can’t they code this thing right? Why would anyone want to use Facebook if it didn’t work half the time?

Still, I continued to use it, because I thought I could make it work. Shortly afterward, Facebook decided that it wanted to make my personal posts more private public, and forced its new privacy policy on me. I knew before that Facebook’s privacy policies weren’t very good, and I never felt comfortable sharing information on the Internet without knowing who exactly would be able to see it. So, for awhile, I just didn’t log on.

I eventually decided to fix my privacy settings in Facebook’s labyrinthine inner workings, and continued using it despite that. Then Facebook decided that it didn’t look good enough, so it changed the way it looked. Except the new look, though different, wasn’t any better. It was still hard to find things, still confusing to use, still lacking rhyme or reason to its UI.

And then there were the things people posted. I wasn’t interested in the minute details of everyone’s life. I wasn’t interested in gossip. It bored me real fast. It felt so juvenile, like high school all over again. Sure, it’s nice to know what people are up to, but you don’t have to give me every single detail! I was just drowning in all the noise. There was barely any signal, just noise. It made it hard to reply to other people’s posts, and hard to get replies on my own, defeating the purpose of “social networking”. I was spending too much time just trying to find the signal, all while trying to fight the site’s poor interface.

During my constant frustration, not to mention waste of time, I started thinking to myself, “Why am I using this thing?” “Why am I wasting my time on this site?” I asked myself that, and I reminded myself that I started using Facebook “because everybody else wanted me to use it”. I never liked doing things just because they’re “cool”. I like doing things because I like doing things.

So I decided I needed to de-friend Facebook. I logged out one last time a few days ago. I’ll see if I feel like returning in a month or so. Sure, it’s cool to be friends with the cool kid, but the relationship is shallow and it only makes you feel bad in the end. I’d rather be friends with somebody whose company I truly enjoy – wouldn’t you? It’s interesting what comes up as the first result in Google if you do a search for “why I quit”. It’s not smoking, it’s not dope, it’s… well, do it and find out!

Oh, and the fact that yesterday, Facebook was granted a patent for the news feed doesn’t make me like Facebook either. We’ve had “news feeds” since Lincoln used telegraph office in the war department to keep track of the war effort. You can’t tell me the news feed is really anything new right now.

I don’t care if Facebook is cool or not. I wish another social network would come along and kill Facebook. I hate Facebook. There, I said it. That made me feel better.

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Richard Nixon created President’s Day in 1971. Photo courtesy whitehouse.gov

As a Lincoln fan and somebody who loves history, President’s Day has always striked me as the most useless holiday on the calendar. Why do we need such a generic holiday on the calendar? Is there any reason why all of our presidents should be placed on equal footing? C’mon, you can’t seriously say that James Buchanan, Richard Nixon, and Millard Fillmore are on the same footing as Lincoln and Washington.

What’s more, President’s Day (which is the 3rd Monday in February) can never fall on Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12th) or Washington’s Birthday (February 22nd). Talk about useless! No wonder so many states and localities (Illinois included) make a separate holiday for Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday.

All President’s Day is really known for is stupid sales at big box stores. I don’t know of any celebrations that happen on President’s Day. I really wish our Federal Government would care more about our history and separate it out back into Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12th) and Washington’s Birthday (February 22nd) the way it was intended to be. President’s Day is a “compromise” that doesn’t satisfy anyone. You wouldn’t celebrate the 4th of July on any other day, so why should we celebrate the contributions of Lincoln and Washington on a holiday not named for them that can’t occur on either of their birthdays?

Abraham Lincoln (Picture Copyright © 2009 Chris Umhoefer, Lincoln Apparel)

Maybe we should call President’s Day Richard Nixon Day. The seedy history of President’s Day begins with him, when he decided that in 1971 that he was just as worthy as Lincoln and Washington and that Federal government workers only needed one day off in February. So he merged the two into the holiday now known as “President’s Day”. Three years earlier, in 1968, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act established that most federal holidays would fall on a Monday, except for days like, oh, Christmas (oh, how convenient and important to our nation’s history). This is why, for instance, MLK Day (established in 1986) is on a Monday and not normally on his birthday (January 15th) either.

George Washington (courtesy whitehouse.gov)

Prior to 1971, Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday had been commonly celebrated for 105 years. Lincoln’s Birthday was first widely celebrated in 1866, after Lincoln’s assassination, and Washington’s Birthday was commonly celebrated during Lincoln’s time. I wish they were celebrated widely today, but instead we’re left with the mundane but “convenient” President’s Day, which contributes to our nation’s already high historical illiteracy rate and doesn’t really celebrate anything.

We as a nation need to be more aware of the contributions of great figures in our history, and why their contributions are relevant to today, and President’s Day and the Uniform Monday Holiday Act don’t help. They hurt, and de-emphasize our history. For the sake of our nation and our history, we need to make Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday federal holidays again, and have them fall on their actual birthdays.

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And anything else these days which is poorly made and/or designed. (Which most products made in third world countries, not just China, are.) Besides, with our economy in the worst recession of my lifetime, I’d rather support Americans and American-made products with my money rather than sending it out of the country. And of course, who knows whether that cheap third-world import was made in sweatshop conditions that Abraham Lincoln would not approve of. I have nothing against Chinese people (or the people of any other country for that matter), what I don’t like is the exploitation of third world labor by large greedy US corporations, and the inflated profit margins, lost jobs, and reduced product quality that results.

I’m trying to find some safety pins and string to attach tags to my made-in-the-USA Lincoln T-shirts, that basically have my business card on the front and a little story about how and why they were made on the back. I think it gives them a nice, human touch, that goes to show that my shirts were made by a human being who cares about Abraham Lincoln and spends time creating quality artwork instead of by some big, out-of-state company selling cheap, tacky souvenirs.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any safety pins that are NOT made in China! You’d think for an item that cheap, it’d cost more just to ship it from China to the U.S. than it would to make it in the U.S. But nooooo, it has to be made in China! (And no, I’m not shopping at Wal-Mart for these, or any other big box store for that matter. I hate those places with a passion.) I want to only use U.S. suppliers for my T-shirts and anything that goes along with them. I love and admire Abraham Lincoln and so I feel I must adhere to his morals and ideals, so it makes me angry that I can ONLY find “Made in China”.

Cracked Made in China Shoe

All this, and I’m walking around doing my photography project (and of course, dealing with my T-shirts), in shoes that are only about 6 months old. They’re literally falling apart. The tread on the bottom of the shoes is mostly gone. They have HUGE cracks along the bottom, where the sole and the walls of the shoe meet. Guess where they were made? In CHINA, of course! They’re not even worth the $20 I spent on them at Target. Shoes should last longer than 6 months. Next time, I’m going to buy a pair of New Balance shoes made in the USA. I walk a lot, so I need good walking shoes – it’s my primary mode of transportation, since I live near downtown Springfield, and I go there most days.

Busted Made in China zipper

Oh, and I also have a bag I carry around with me sometimes I got at Target too. My sister helped me sew a picture of Lincoln on it (taken from an old, but faithful, Lincoln T-shirt) to personalize it. I’ve gotten lots of comments on it. The picture is fine, but some of the zippers on the bag are broken, and it’s starting to develop a few holes. It’s maybe only about 1-1/2 years old. And of course, it’s made in China (except for the Lincoln picture obviously).

And I don’t need to tell you about the $150 “Circuit City special” home theater in box system that never worked right that my mom got me for Christmas a few years back, do I? It was made in China, too! But it could never play DVDs without skipping on the smallest miniscule scratches, and on CDs, after playing for about 30 minutes, it’d start to sound like the singer (and the music) was underwater. And the center speaker only worked half of the time (it had a loose connection). Total waste of money. It’s since been replaced by a good set of Logitech 5.1 speakers connected to my Audigy 4 sound card and a cable running from my video card to my TV.

This T-shirt, which I designed myself, is over 5 years old.

What really riles me is that some shops want me to sell my Lincoln T-shirts, that I often spend over 50 hours per design creating, and have printed at a high quality local printer, for the same price as the poorly made and designed chintzy third-world junk that probably costs like $1-$2 to make. They act like art is free, and like labor is free, like all the work I do to create them means nothing, and that quality can be had for the same price as the cheap stuff. Well, I’ve been doing Lincoln T-shirts for years (and wearing Lincoln T-shirts even longer) and I can tell you you get what you pay for. The cheap, chintzy, third world country-made shirts are made of the thinnest possible fabric, the printing is the lowest possible quality and looks like it’ll fade/bleed/crack after a few washings, and it looks like the designer only spent maybe 1 hour on it using clipart. Meanwhile, I have Lincoln shirts I’ve made and Lincoln shirts other local artists have created that have lasted me 5 years or more, still going strong, and aside from a little fading, they still look fine. (And of course, the designs are INFINITELY better.)

I’m done with cheap junk. I wouldn’t take it even if it was free. Problem is, companies like Wal-Mart and the other big box stores (and companies like Event Network which runs the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum gift shop) want it to be your only choice. Heck, sometimes IT IS the only choice. They want fatter profit margins, so they buy the cheapest junk possible and resell it at high markups (Event Network marks up stuff about 800%, seriously). Because they control so much of the retail market, the stuff that’s priced somewhat higher, but is much better quality is eliminated from the market, meaning other local retailers couldn’t stock it even if they wanted to. Indeed, part of the reason I like to do Lincoln T-shirts is to provide a quality alternative to the cheap junk for local retailers.

If Lincoln was alive today, I think he’d be incredibly angry at our state of things. He would not approve of sweatshop labor or other exploitation in third world countries, or of anything that doesn’t last. Reading about him, I always get a sense he had an appreciation for things that lasted. He even fixed stuff that busted – one of the stories often told at the Lincoln Home (not every ranger tells this story) is that one of the legs on his desk broke, and somebody told him that he should get a new one. Well, Lincoln essentially said that the desk was still perfectly good otherwise, so he put a new leg on it and said it was as good as new. How much of today’s junk is repairable or serviceable in that manner?

Over 21 years old, and it still works.

The amazing, and sad, thing is how far we’ve come in the last 15 years. Growing up in the 80s, I remember how you could expect things to last. Many of these things I still have today, and they still work, too. A lot was still made in the USA, and if it wasn’t, it was made in Japan, Canada, or Western Europe. “Cheap” was an insult. Ever since the early 1990s, when Wal-Mart and the other big box stores and free trade agreements came, we’ve been shipping jobs overseas trying to “beat the system” by buying stuff at cheaper prices (where the true costs are hidden). Cheap electronics, cheap clothing, cheap housing, cheap loans. Buy now, pay later. Now, that’s catching up to us. And I’m sick of it. I want quality goods at reasonable prices supporting ideals Lincoln would believe in, not cheap. I stumbled on this book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, the other day while googling around. I haven’t read it, but it sounds like it illustrates our problem. Cheap is too expensive – it costs too much in the long run.

I can’t afford cheap.

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