Friends and Enemies
This morning I spoke to an associate that I first met in late 2008 (fifteen years ago). For the better part of six years of that time we worked together in what was a fairly strained relationship. We were never outwardly hostile to one another, but let’s just say that there was a lot of tension. Now, with the mellowing of age and the passage of time, we are quite friendly in a way that we were back fifteen years ago, but which was not at all characteristic of the way we interacted for many years. Its kind of like that movie, We Were Soldiers, where Mel Gibson engages in a battle to the death with his Vietcong opponents and then years later they meet and are very respectful and friendly towards each other. There is something about doing battle that bonds people together in a strange way and eventually makes them understand each other in a deeper way than you might expect. I’ve noticed this phenomenon on several occasions.
My most tumultuous battles during my years at Bear Stearns in one way or another involved one particular senior guy who was very close with the Chairman of the firm. Kim will recall that there was many a night that I would punch my pillow before going to bed with a cry to the heavens of, “Fucking so-and-so” (name withheld out of courtesy). But a few years after we stopped working together, and therefore against each other, he asked to borrow my house in Ithaca and I agreed for some reason. Every since then, I have counted him as a friend and not an enemy, and while we do not get together often, when we do speak it is on completely friendly terms. It is as though we have both rewritten history and completely forgotten the tough times and only remember that we both went through a lot together.
Almost every tour of duty that I had over the years had a significant antagonist to my protagonist, and I tend to remember them all quite well. I have also stayed friends with many others who I was genuinely friendly with at the time and they have sometimes noted that I have more than a normal level of tolerance for the person who we considered the enemy at the time when we all worked together. They don’t seem to understand why I am more kind-hearted towards that old enemy and I am generally at a loss to answer why that is so.
I think that it must be that friends and enemies are more circumstantial than not. it seems to be kind of like the observation that many of us have that cops and robbers are not such different sorts of people and that the two are more alike in many ways than distinctly different. There seems to be a fine line separating friends and enemies and we are perhaps drawn to one another based on the , even though we are sometimes cast against one another on the field of battle. Generally speaking, we tend to share some form of common enemy that afflicted us both even though at the time, that seemed to be more in the background and the hand-to-hand combat was more with one another. I guess that is to suggest that we are all struggling against the environment or the universe, if you will, and survival puts us momentarily against one another, but the real underlying battle is one for survival against the forces of nature that are out of either of our control.
This morning I read in the New York Times about the evolving nature of the struggle in America against the immigration crisis. There is a multi-faceted issue that tends to pit one political opponent against another and yet the underlying reasons are sometimes anathema to the core principles at play. Assuming that we are all of a mind to be kind to people less fortunate than ourselves (a bit of a stretch to claim for some people, but I would grant this to be more or less the case at the most human level), the economics of immigration can tilt back and forth against the policies of one Party versus another. The red border states of Texas and Florida are generally more anti-immigration and the northern, more distant states that need cheap labor tend to be more pro-immigration. Lately, those same northern states and cities, some of which even have attained the status of “Sanctuary Cities” have been so overwhelmed by immigrants that they have become some of the loudest proponents of a more controlled immigration policy. In that case, the friends and enemies lines are constantly shifting. The reds are wanting less “difficult” immigrants in the country, but kind of like the cheap labor and the progressives who generally are more pro-immigrant have shifted to the other side on the view that the cheap labor is holding down the wages for other working class Americans who they think deserve out support.
That domestic economic battlefield is not so different from the global geopolitical battlefield where a staunch Republican like Richard Nixon can open up ties with China only to have China be the arch-enemy of Republican America in 2024. It is not so unusual to see a shifting allegiance. We were allied with CHina and Russia during WWII and pitted against Germany, Japan and Italy. Now the opposite is true and that change occurred very soon after WWII and did not really take years to evolve. In fact, Russia is more of a love/hate or friend/enemy conundrum for the United States than not. I think it is fair to say that in 2024 half the country despises Russia and the totalitarian ideology that it embodies, while the other half is not so sure that such a totalitarian approach to politics and life is such a bad thing. That feels strange to those of us who grew up during the Cold War, but then I know the parents of many of my Jewish friends had trouble buying a Mercedes due to similar lingering feelings about Germany.
Back on the home front, our best friends and our worst enemies can the the people who live right next to us and should be closest to us. And yet, cut one errant branch off an overhanging tree and you can start a feud that can transcend any single backyard tree. I will postulate that people are simply torn by the dynamics of relationships. Think of the two expressions, “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “out of sight, out of mind”. We are always struggling with the notion of whether we are more drawn to like-minded people or if opposites attract. i will be that if you review those who you have most battled in life, I will guess that they are most like you rather than so very different from you. It seems to be a quirk of nature that we are destined to be in these constantly shifting relationship sands. I do tend to think that the best medicine to heal old wounds is the passage of time and the mellowing that comes with age. When we are young and aggressive, enemies abound, but when we are old and somewhat tired and more peace-loving, friends are in short supply and we seek them out wherever they arise.
If only we could be as enlightened and peaceful in our youth as we are in our older age, we might spend less time battling each other and more time finding cooperative means to the same ends.