Judge Alex's Facebook Page: A Turn for the Worse

I have an aunt who is not technically my aunt, but she functions as one. She's only seven years older than I, but she's through undergraduate school, has a master's degree, and is nearly finished with law school, so it's like she is of a totally different generation than I. Our fathers have been best friends since they were about twelve, and our mothers became close friends as soon as they married our fathers. When i was little, I stayed with my aunt's family because I was very ill and my mom was too scik with cancer to take care of me. My aunt has taken responsibility for me for three summers in a row, sort of like a one-kid summer camp.

One thing my aunt and I have in common is "Judge Alex," the TV court show. I started watching it religiously the first summer I spent with her. since then I've been a regular viewer. I read the "Judge Alex" Facebook page. Although I'm not an "other" becuase my parents haven't allowed me to join Facebook. My aunt is an "other" on Judge Alex's page.

In reading this page, I've noticed that things have gotten very ugly. A few ladies who call themselves the gaggle seem to desire to rule the page. They make inside jokes that aren't even semi-funny at others' expense. They claim ownership of ludicrous things, such as of a supposed artist who is supposedly creating a portrait of Judge Alex Ferrer out of beads. If this artist even exists. The whole thing reeks of a hoax to me, and not a particularly funny one at that, as the "artist" is supposedly 105 years old. The artist refers to the people who praise her or, more likely, to the people who invented her, as "my angels." I think, although I may be speaking erroneously here (and if any of the gaggle were to learn that I spoke erroneously,however innocently, woe would be unto me) that each of her three or four "angels" has a separate name. If anyone else on the board lays any claim to the artist or to her work, the gaggle loses its collective feathers. It's a scary sight to see.

Since I don't have Facebook posting privileges, this is purely hypothetical, but if I were to post on the page that I had it on inside authority that the beads used for the judge's eyes were hazelnut-brow, I would be attacked, probabl with my name posted in capital letters, for writing something that was incorrect. If I suggested that the eyebrows were created with ink-black beads rather than with raven-black beads, the same would happen.

In any event, fanatics will be fanatics, fools will be fools, and mean people will be mean people. I really could not have cared much less until the gaggle chose to be unkind to my aunt. My aunt is a sweet soul who is unkind to no one. She traps stray cats and pays to have them spayed or neutered. She buys something from every kid who comes to her door selling something -- even when it's that ridiculously over-priced stale peanut brittle. She has even taken her students and their siblings into her home for months at a time when their parents could not care for them.

On top of everything else, my aunt is seriously ill. She has cystic fibrosis, which is usually diagnosed in early infancy but inexplicably was not in her case. She's working hard to finish law school even with her illness, and this gaggle of honkers is poking fun of her and denigrating her merely because she politely defended a friend when the person was put into a virtual pillory for supposedly inaccurately reporting on the status of the all-important beaded portrait of Judge Alex.

These honking geese are speaking of my aunt as though she is a very stupid person even though their combined post-secondary years of education probably do not equal hers. Furthermore, she's never received a grade as low as an A minus in her entire life. They're taking polls among themselves about when she'll comment next, and taking great pleasure in announcing the winners. They're making fun of her and hurting her feeling, and clicking "like" on each others' negative comments about her. Her friends wish, and probably rightfully so, to stay out of the fray, but the end result is that she feels she has no friends and is being ganged up on and outnumbered, and is beginning to believe that maybe they're right and she is stupid.

My aunt is at the very end of law school. She has to finish a take-home final, present and defend a brief, and question others' briefs, for which she will also be graded. Right now she is too sick to do any of this. She's on the floor of her bathroom with towels to keep her warm against the cold tiles of the bathroom floor and the chills she's suffereing from her fever. Her husband is working a twenty-four hour shift at a hospital out of town and can't do anything to help her. Her husband's relatives are either out of town or too b usy to help. Her parents live thousands of miles away. My parents live more than eight hundred miles away. No one can help her.

This gaggle of subhumanity on Judge Alex's Facebook pagehas no level beneath which they will not stoop. They don't care if they make my aunt so sick that she can't finish her final academic obligations. They probably wouldn't even cared if the illness killed her. She does have cystic fibrosis, and any illness is worse for her than it would be for another person without cystic fibrosis.

These women proudly call themselves Christians.