Let Crazy Be Crazy

On sharing a country with the irrational

The progressive tradition of getting rid of “the stress and anxiety of opposite viewpoints” has deep roots.

After the last election, I lost all my left-of-center friends. They needed to huddle with the like-minded, thinking bitter and contemptuous thoughts of people like me, without any contrary facts to confuse them or disturb their counter-wa. They were at peace with the lonely arrogance of the self-righteous. Well, not really at peace. I don’t think they’ll know peace anytime soon. Just an equilibrium of wounded superiority.

One of these was my supposed best friend, call him Tom, whom I’d known for twenty years, and who had, just nine months before, sat with me through my daughter’s funeral, a wrenching episode that followed more than two years of struggle against cancer, complete with surgery, chemotherapy, and having a baby. He had honestly been there for me through that. I would never have thought that he’d one day tell me he’d never speak to me again. It was as shocking as it was painful.

And there were others, and all within a week. I keep wondering what I could have done to prevent this. Had I spoken too harshly about politics, been too certain I was right, not listened well enough?

These things might well be true, but they probably didn’t make any difference. Any balance that depends on getting it exactly right, all the time, is not going to work for long. I think all I could have done was drag it out.

It’s pretty hard to listen to people malign everything you believe in without wanting to just explain yourself. It takes a far better man than I to sit quietly time after time, and it would probably be no use to try. Truth will out. If lunatic statements like expressing doubt that the people of West Virginia are opposed to slavery today don’t make you want to speak out, you are wired differently than I am.

And I’m sorry, lunatic is the word, though deranged works pretty well, too. This is the message Tom sent me:

I reached a tipping point in my life where it's not healthy for me to have the stress and anxiety of opposite viewpoints on the election, on religion, on euthanasia, abortion, sexuality, or any of the other big hot button issues that are in my psyche………….We have talked and spent a lot of time together and I have discovered we have radically different beliefs that are outweighing the desire to spend time together right now. The things you have said about the election put me over the top.

And here’s what I got from another friend, call him Matt:

It saddens and alarms me at how far your world view has devolved…………….during our recent meeting you were clearly self-satisfied in declaring that you had voted in "… defense of the first amendment and the rule of law". You have embraced the party whose 'leader' is a petulant, venal, depraved coward and cretin. Through the example of his egregious behavior other punks and thugs at all level of society are now emboldened. The fact that your chosen party did nothing to curtail that odious behavior suggests that neither you or your party are offended by his depravity.

When knowledgeable, conservative folks like Liz or Dick Cheney (the antithesis of 'libs'), or Generals Kelly, Milley, or 'Mad Dog' Matthis (decidedly not snowflakes), warned of the threat to our democracy posed by another Trump administration, you evidently were not listening.

I will employ whatever means necessary to protect my family and community from their egregious behavior. That is my right, my duty. I am pissed and I am not afraid!

It’s so deranged, I’d be embarrassed for anyone to see it with his real name.

And the tragedy is, these are good people. In every other regard, they’re good friends. How did this happen? Friends used to be able to disagree about politics, and even argue about them, but still be friends. The level of animosity we now have is recent. I can remember the first time I heard someone say, proudly, “I don’t even know any conservatives.” That was around 2010. That’s about when this all began.

Barak Obama’s second campaign relied heavily on a strategy of appealing to character. Moral people, good people, voted for him. The smart people, the enlightened people. Troglodytes voted for Republicans. And it kept getting worse. The Republicans came to be called rascists, fascists, Nazis, and all sorts of “-phobes.” No slur was too extravagant.

If you, too, wanted to be a good person, you had to be a progressive. That’s who the progressives are. And who doesn’t want to be a good person? Rascists, Nazis, and phobes. The calculus is really simple, and it was hammered home all the time.

Eventually, this lead to the censorship of any contrary expression. The media was well in the pocket of the Democrats, and by Trump’s first term, it became a parody of journalism. You could look at the New York Times website, and find over twenty articles at one time about Trump, all of them negative. You literally could not tell the news page from the op-ed page. The ideal of fair, balanced and neutral reporting was replaced by a universal left-wing bias.