I awoke this morning with a new vigor. Brought on by the fact that I have listened
and macerated on the events of the last week and realized that there is no
amount of justification that I can conceive for this current situation that has
manifested. And in watching events
unfold I have made another stark realization.
I no longer have the stomach for angry interaction and blatant disregard
for human decency.
I have told myself every positive thing that I can think of
to warrant continuing in friendships that are not healthy for me. “We have a history,” “We have been friends since school.” “You are
a good person.” The list is long and not
necessary for action at this point. But the
answer that I have come up with is that in order to actually be friends I have
to actually break down what being a “friend” means to me.
I decided to start at the most common of places: The
dictionary.
Miriam Webster defines friend in several ways.
1.
2.
3.
There are other, more loose, definitions, but this was a
good starting place for me. First off
let me say that for years many of you have been my friends without really
knowing my political or religious beliefs.
You never asked, never seemed to care, or it just wasn’t important
enough to make a deal out of it. And similarly,
I have not made a big deal of my beliefs politically or religiously. To me it is just not that important.
So what exactly does it mean to be a friend in my eyes?
First and foremost we have to have something in common that
brought us together. And that cannot be
a piece of software. I saw something in
you and you saw something in me that made us say, this person is cool I want to
get to know them. Now unfortunately what
I have learned is that having gone to the same school is not necessarily an
instant requisite for friendship. I went
to my first 12 years of school surrounded by Catholics and indoctrinated by the
Catholic ideology. And you would think
that the goodness and charity of the Catholic faith would be a good
foundation. But what I have learned is
that many (NOT ALL) of my Catholic
classmates have become caustic, mean-spirited, and think that being Catholic is
a free pass on the Right-wing Express!
Conversely, my next several years were spent steeped in Fundamentalist,
Far-right leaning, religious education and the few friends that I still have
from that experience are some of the most compassionate, thoughtful and loving
humans I know. It sometimes weirds me
out thinking about it, but I have resigned myself that this is the way of the
world.
As you can see, commonality is not in itself a reason to be
friends, but it is one aspect.
Second, there has to be an amount of respect that is
shared. And that respect can be
reflected in a willingness to listen to each other even when our beliefs do not
match. This is a tricky point. Because in order for me to respect you, and
vice-versa, we have to intelligently, articulately, and compassionately explain
our beliefs. And in order to do this, we
have to be educated. Educated in our
beliefs. We can’t be throwing up on Facebook
because we saw a meme, that albeit may be funny, is at its core false,
misleading, or hurtful to a whole group of people. So often in the past year I have seen a
reposting of an actual event (from a news source, activist group, or idiot)
that takes a statement out of context or changes a word in a phrase that
completely changes the meaning and makes it a complete falsehood. It is then reposted by a ‘friend’ as a ‘real’
story. And at first I go ‘omg, how
horrible!’ And then I go to the source
of the meme and find that it is not actually what happened, but a
sensationalistic re-transcribing of an event with new verbiage to promote a
certain skew of reality. And suddenly,
there goes respect out the window.
Because you did not educate yourself before posting it. And I do not remove myself from this phenomenon,
I have actually done it myself. But I have
also taken it down when I realized my mistake.
Third, you have to be able to state your case without being
demeaning, disrespectful, condescending, belligerent, or berating of
others. If you express yourself with
kindness and thoughtfulness towards those who may not share your beliefs, then I
can accept that as an effort to educate rather than pompously placing yourself
above others.
And lastly, we have to like each other even when our beliefs
are diametrically opposed to each other.
And the only way for that to exist is for the other three on the list to
be in full effect.
I don’t ever want to be the person who unfriends someone for
their beliefs because they are opposed to mine, but I damn sure will unfriend
someone because they are acting in a hateful, disrespectful way towards me or
others on my list. If you want to be a belligerent
asshole, then go be a belligerent asshole somewhere else. Do me the favor of defriending me so that I at
least know you have some integrity. Because if you don’t? I will do it for you. And it doesn’t matter if we have known each
other all of our lives, or had some common event that drew us together, or that
we are aware of intimate details of each other’s lives. If you decide to lash out and be that person
that most people hate to see on Facebook, then ‘click’ you are gone.
I have decided to remove those negative people from my life,
instead I am focusing on passionate people that intelligently know how to
express themselves.
Now hear is the one caveat.
If you are a fervent sycophant of “The Donald” we are not likely to find
common ground in being friends. And that
is not because I have a bent towards Clinton or other, former candidate. It is because of the destructive nature of
this individual. And if you truly cannot
see it, then you certainly do not fit in any of the previous categories. Now notice that I did not say if you voted
for “The Donald” or agree with him on some of his campaign issues. That is a whole other post! Many good people
were duped by his rhetoric.
I have always been tolerant, to a point, of other
ideologies. That is how I have grown
through the ages. But it is my opinion
that I have always been able to Snope out the craziness of something and glean
the sensibility from it. Perhaps I am
deceived, but I will continue to be deceived if it means caring about the world
and its occupants more than the differences that tend to separate us.
We may have been friends, once. We may continue to be friends. But it is in your hands too!
I know that it sounds corny, especially coming from a closet
introvert that can at times seem like he doesn’t like people all that much, but
the truth is that I love people. I just
do not wish to surround myself with the ones that lack intelligence.
Peace.
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