The descent of Facebook into its natural level–a place where no one can get the living snot whaled out of him or her for being just plain rude, thus people say things they would not say in person and expect no backlash–has led us to a new means of lowering the dialogue level. I call it the Social Grenade.

A social grenade is a statement that follows fairly close to the model: “If you disagree, you have no value.” I call it a social grenade because it catches everyone who sees it in the blast radius, sparing only those it imagines that it exempts. I thought of calling it the social mortar round, but a mortar (an indirect fire weapon) lacks the personal connotation of a hand-thrown or launcher-fired fragmentation grenade. A modern trip through Facebook feels like a trip through no-man’s-land in which both sides pitch periodic grenades and rarely look to see where they fell.

I suspect it is exhausting. People may be having difficult times coming up with suitably alienating and relationship-impairing social grenades. My initial reaction was to compose a post like “If you throw social grenades, please tie a garbage bag tightly over your head.” I am normally a believer in fighting fire with napalm fire, revenge doubling the wrong done, letting people see how it feels, making sure the lesson takes; however, blind adherence to past practice leads to dumb present practice. The brain is not obsolete, even if it may happen to be in disfavor. Don’t always go with your gut, for it is sometimes queasy.

After giving it about two seconds of thought,  I thought I would light a candle rather than curse the darkness. I would offer something proactive and helpful: a handy social grenade assembly guide to smooth and assist in the complete deterioration of all worthwhile dialogue. If the goal is to wreck the maximum number of relationships, let’s streamline the process. Why make alienation harder than it needs to be?

To use this quick-assembly tool, when you come to bracketed items, choose the option that best fits. Please remember that these are only suggestions; if none of the given choices are sufficiently fanatical, invent and insert your own. (If they are all too fanatical for you, you are not the type to throw social grenades, so this is unhelpful for you. When all the social grenadiers have blown up all their relationships, look around you: the survivors will be those who did not participate. They may be very fun people.)

The social grenade begins with your statement of opinion (or absolute truth, if your view does not allow for any remote possibility of differing views qualifying as opinions). So:

My

• [opinion]
• [belief]
• [thesis]
• [truth]
• [personal hobbyhorse]
• [monomania]
• [objective reality]
• [divine revelation]
• [horoscope]
• [meme]
• [{other} ________]

is that [{expound your viewpoint here}______________________] and that this view is

• [divinely revealed, that’s why I called it a damn divine revelation]
• [fundamentally perfect]
• [way cool]
• [duh, winning]
• [too obvious to explain to idiots]
• [Zen master wisdom]
• [the best ever]
• [eternal truth]
• [bae]
• [the only valid perspective]
• [woke with a mighty waking]
• [obvious to anyone who was not randomly trepanned in infancy]
• [directly from the {Bible/Qur’an/Talmud/sports section/bathroom graffiti/________}]
• [{morally/intellectually/genetically/_____ly} superior]

[{./!/!!!/!!!!!!!!!!!!!!}]

If you disagree, your

• [perspective]
• [delusion]
• [Cthulhu worship]
• [baffling lapse in reason]
• [opinion]
• [conclusion]
• [tragic mental deficiency]
• [raving]
• [idiocy]
• [psychological incontinence]
• [cretinism]
• [ideological perv]
• [demonic evil]
• [drug-induced foolishness]
• [laughable standpoint]
• [dipshittery]
• [warped reality]

…

• [is wrong]
• [sucks real hard]
• [would embarrass a lobotomized tree sloth]
• [is actively leading us to degeneracy]
• [makes me puke]
• [makes me prolapse my stomach, I took selfies as proof]
• [is cray cray]
• [makes a strong case for whacking one’s head against a bridge abutment]
• [admits liking Justin Bieber]
• [wrote in Kim Jong-Un during the last election for all the offices]
• [saddens me for humanity]
• [poaches baby elephants]
• [would drive a living saint to opium addiction]
• [is worse than Hitler]
• [is worse than Hitler and Himmler combined]

Therefore, if you feel this way,

• [hang yourself]
• [unfriend me now]
• [unfriend and block me now]
• [unfriend, block, and sue me now]
• [unfriend, block, and ambush me now]
• [consume a sack of penises]
• [I will burn your name over a purple flame mounted in a virgin’s skull at midnight]
• [auto-euthanasia is worth exploring]
• [you suck]
• [add some tinfoil to your next pizza]
• [add some drano to your next pizza]
• [please get cancer]
• [I hate you]
• [your feelings are invalid]
• [in the garage is a running engine with your name on it]
• [never speak to me again]
• [you are such a fuckhead]
• [you deserve a fatal yeast infection]
• [I will hunt you down with a nailgun and a bad attitude]
• [you need mental help]
• [you need mental health institutionalization]

[./!/!!!/!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!/]

There. Hope that makes it easier!