The Changing Tide
Based on yesterday’s story that mentioned sea kayaking, you are probably thinking that I went against my better instincts and tried sea kayaking and got swept out to sea on the tide. Not even remotely likely. The tide that is changing is the tide of my heart and mind. For six years or so, not so accidentally coinciding with the arrival of Donald J. Trump on the political landscape, I have taken a posture with Kim that we need to be accepting and calm about the views of some of our friends who are less liberal-minded than we are and who tend towards the conservative end of the spectrum on economic and social issues. It has gotten distinctly harder and harder to ignore or be oblivious to political orientation in our social universe, and I do not think we are alone in this. I suspect that most Americans, and perhaps people of other nationalities as well, feel what we feel regardless of which end of the political spectrum they tend towards. Political persona and presence is simply more a part of people’s mantra than it has ever been in our lifetime. Perhaps this phenomenon existed at other times in our country’s past, but this has maxed out for any time I can recall in the last fifty or more years. People like to say that that the Nixon/Watergate era was like this, but I lived through that and was young and full of anti-war and anti-Nixon sentiment and I never felt as galvanized as I do now.
This past week I chose to write a story one morning about my two motorcycle buddies that lean decidedly right of me and with whom I carry on an active text exchange, mostly on tongue-in-cheek political views. I get sent stupid memes that are occasionally (only rarely, in my opinion, funny), and I send them more serious evidence that they need to rethink some of their more militant stands. It is all good natured and we all three have thick skins on the topic. The story I wrote about them this week was about how their actions speak more loudly than their words and that they are both better people and more caring about others (some like to call that Socialism) than they allow their rhetoric to imply. The joke was simply that they aren’t as hard line as they think and that as much as the label disagrees with them, they have a touch of the socialist in them as almost everybody does. None of us likes to think of ourselves as socialists, mostly because we have all been taught that socialism has been an abject failure as it has been tried over the past two hundred years here and in other countries around the world. I won’t bother to debate the subject of socialism because that is too heavy for a short story like this, but I stand resolute in the view that to the majority of Americans today, suggesting that they may be a Socialist is as close to fighting words as one can get. So naturally, in the most true to form type of humor, I wrote that perhaps they were really Socialists and didn’t know it, with my tongue fully in my cheek and intending to be provocative.
Something we all encounter in life at one time or another and I do especially because of my tendency to write stories that cross over into mentioning or characterizing the lives of people I know, is that some people see humor for what it is and other people just see words that they take offense to and blot out the more subtle things said around those words that are intended to be humorous. I am also prepared to accept responsibility for perhaps treading too close to the line between humor and seriousness and should recognize that that line is tending to shift these days and people may be more sensitive than at other times. I will also accept the distinct possibility that I actually might apply some bad judgement and simply say things about people not realizing that they will take offense. It is a risk of being a storyteller that I consider inevitable. I feel I have gotten better at threading the needle and staying out of trouble, but sometimes I certainly face-plant and cause a commotion.
In the instance of that Socialism story, I caught hell in public (copy all) that I was politicizing a group (our motorcycle gang) that I had no business politicizing. This was actually not the first time I have been accused of that, so I tend to be a bit sheepish about my transgression. No one likes to get bitch-slapped and I got bitch-slapped by someone who I hold in high regard, such that I cannot even say to myself, “consider the source”. I did check with others on the email chain and they thought my story was funny and not offensive, but who knows if they were just being diplomatic in ways I had not. My two texting buddies did not seem to be offended. One made light of it and the other simply said no one would ever accuse him of being a Socialist, saying that in a serious manner as though my suggestion was intended to be serious, which it was not. Another friend who sits on the political spectrum at least as far right as either of my text buddies and is generally held in very high regard since he held a very significant public office as well as having been a very successful businessman, said in a copy all email that I should write whatever I want because it is all about free speech. In other words, he turned one of the tropes of conservative thought right onto me, which was perhaps even more brilliant than my trying to slap my pals around with the Socialism stick. Bravo.
While this minor tempest in a teacup has passed, the effect it has had on me is to combine with another interaction I had to stop me in my tracks. I have some friends that are decidedly pro-life. We are decidedly pro-choice, but I find the abortion issue to be so very complex and thorny that I do not get offended by people with different views. However, I recently heard those same people defend Donald Trump in the context of the Mar-A-Lago top-secret document scandal, pulling out all the denials and arguments akin to the election deniers bible to say that the whole story hasn’t come out yet (evidence to the contrary notwithstanding), that security clearance is at the discretion of the President (not even close to being an accurate reflection of the facts), and that many secret government documents have no reason for being classified as secret (a complete avoidance tactic that completely ignores the issue of the rule of law). This offended me in a way that I have not been able to get over.
I have been telling Kim for years that we must be tolerant of other people’s views and not let differing politics interfere with our friendships. We must look beyond the politics, not unlike what my chastising friend was telling me about my Socialism story. But I feel that something has changed. I choose to call it the changing tide of social interaction. You would not let friendship override a person being of murderous, larcenous or terroristic ways, would you? Those are not different views, those have to do with different values. I have concluded that I cannot tolerate people who will say or do anything to stand strong for their political views. If they have lost the ability to reason or accept facts, which I believe most remaining Trump supporters (of which there are an amazingly large number still) have, I don’t think I can be friends with them any longer. I can be civil. I can tolerate their existence and their right to speak their views freely. But I cannot be friends with them. Let me be clear, none of my friends in the case of this text and email exchange issue fall into that category, but others do and I am afraid that the changing tide of my sensibilities have put me in a place of needing to be resolute. If people cannot accept facts, if people insist on politics over common sense, I cannot be friends with them.