Stumbling Toward the Light

In the last few years, an awful lot of people have found it needful to remove themselves from relationships with friends, lovers, family members, and others over differences in political views. And almost always, the ones removing themselves have been on the left, and the ones they’re removing themselves from have been on the right.

And the people on the right who find themselves being abandoned by people they’ve known and trusted for years, even decades, are decidedly NOT happy about it. And many of them complain about it in public, on social media and elsewhere. “Why do you have to stop talking to me just because I have a different political view than you do?” they wail. “Are you really going to let politics get in the way of friendship/family ties?” they lament. “For goodness' sake, it's just politics!” they squeal.

Some have even gone so far as to create and share memes about it: “Sam voted for Trump. Diane voted for Hillary. But they’re still friends, because they’re adults. Be like Diane.” The clear implication is that refusing to tolerate opposing views is childish, and that the differences should take a back seat to what really matters in life.

Well, here’s the thing: Too many people—not all of them, but an awful lot, on the right—treat political campaigns and issues as if they were sports teams and competitions. You cheer for your side, trash-talk the other side, and at the end of the game everyone goes home together. But politics isn’t sports. Unless you work for a sports team or a business affiliated with it, or you live near a stadium, the outcome of a football, baseball or basketball game has no effect whatsoever on your day-to-day life.

The same cannot be said for politics. Politics is far more consequential than any sporting match could ever be, because it’s about who runs our government and who gets to make public policy. And those policies and those elected officials affect all of our lives, every single day. But even then, some political differences can be transcended. I’m not necessarily going to stop talking to you because we disagree on how high taxes should be, for example, or where the city lines should be drawn…unless the effect of those policies hurts someone else for no good reason.

The problem, you see, is not difference of opinion per se, but degree and type of difference. It’s not that you have opposing ideas to mine; it’s about exactly what those ideas are. Disagree about whether pineapple belongs on pizza? That won’t drive us apart. Disagree about which political party runs up higher deficits? That one probably won’t, either. But as the great Black writer and speaker James Baldwin said, "We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist." (Emphasis added.)

If your disagreement with me is about whether LGBTQIA+ folks should be allowed to marry or adopt, or trans people should be allowed to exist and live as their chosen gender; about whether police should be allowed to kill Black people with impunity, especially unarmed Black people committing no crime; about whether a woman or girl should be forced to give birth to a child put into her by a sexually abusive relative or rapist; about whether immigrants without documentation should be thrown into camps and have their children ripped from them; or about whether children in school should be allowed to read certain books, or have to spend their classroom time in active-shooter drills…then you and I are going to have a serious problem, because I’m not about to let that sort of difference lie. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, censorship and general assholery—those are all deal-breakers for me.

If you believe in policies or philosophy that actively harms someone else, or a group of people, for no reason other than your interpretation of a 2,000+-year-old book written by a bunch of long-dead men, or what your favorite politician or commentator said about them on TV, or your own prejudices or financial interest, then you are not the person I had thought you were. This goes to character, to conscience, to basic standards of human decency. And if you pal around with me one day and spew insults and threats to me or people who think like me online the next day, or drive around with "Fuck Joe Biden" or "Trump 2024" flags hanging out of your truck bed and honking your horn to piss off liberals, that’s evidence of you not being the sort of “good” person you like people to see you as. There isn’t “political you” and “real you”—there’s only you. The two behaviors are both part and parcel of the same person.

And if you support elected officials, political candidates or organizations who exhibit open cruelty to certain people or groups, who argue for policies that actively and objectively cause harm to those people or groups, who even engage in physical assault upon people they disagree with, or tolerate (or even cheer on) those who do…then you and I have differences a whole lot more serious than whether we’re fans of one sports team or another. And those differences are often very difficult, if not impossible, for me to reconcile with the good, kind, decent, generous person I remember knowing and/or growing up with.

So if you think you’re being unfairly ostracized by me or anyone else for your political beliefs, before you simply assume we’re childish jerks—especially if we haven’t insulted, belittled or otherwise injured you—maybe it’s time for you to take a closer, more critical look at the things you believe and the people and policies you support. Maybe it’s time for you to ask yourself if you’ve been propagandized by conservative “news” media, or influenced by the people you hang out with, and whether you’re still acting on what your parents (hopefully) taught you about right and wrong, good and evil, kindness and cruelty. Ask yourself why someone would need to distance themselves from you, purely to preserve their own sanity and peace of mind.

And that's why you aren’t hearing from your liberal/progressive friends any more.

August 20, 2011

Letters to the Editor/Inbox Time Magazine Time & Life Building New York, NY 10020

Attn: Richard Stengel, Managing Editor Dear Mr. Stengel:

Former Republican Senator John Sununu's meretricious column "It's Obama's Downgrade" in your issue of August 29th cannot go unanswered. His assertion that President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership in Congress are solely to blame for the recent economic policy debacles in Washington willfully ignores his own party's far larger role.

in the first place, even if we only discuss future debt rather than current or previous, much of it is for wars Sununu and his party got us into in Iraq and Afghanistan; the cost of extricating our troops from what are now internal civil wars—and of caring for the wounded coming home from them—would not even exist without their choices in the past decade to send the troops there. Second, the financial crisis took most of a decade of GOP-driven non-enforcement on securities fraud and predatory lending to bring about; no President of either party or philosophy, nor any Congress run by either, can hope to turn a disaster of such magnitude into prosperity within a scant two years in office, or even the four years the Democrats controlled Congress (2006-2010). And it was his party's mule-headed opposition to any and all revenue increases, coupled with their willingness to bring further economic ruin upon the country for the sake of their rich donors' wallets, that prevented enactment of debt reductions sufficient to satisfy the unelected, self-appointed arbiters of our economic destiny at Standard & Poor's.

The Bible (which many of Sununu's GOP confreres seem to think should guide our policy more than the Constitution) reminds us not to worry about the splinter in our neighbor's eye before we've removed the plank in our own. Sununu needs an optical 2x4-ectomy, stat...and if he thinks voters won't remember next November which party was really at fault, numerous recent media polls on the subject ought to have shown him otherwise. Even if the (barely) most credible candidate gets the GOP nomination for next year—Mitt Romney, most likely—he will still have the devil's own time overcoming this bald fact. And as the late sainted GOP icon Ronald Reagan famously observed, "facts are stubborn things." Sincerely, TCC