There are reasons why I can’t buy what some “friends” are selling and why I don’t care if they buy what I’m selling either. I was raised in and around a conservative family. I was raised in a conservative Christian family to be exact. Although they were and are conservative Christians they made sure that my siblings and I listened to the best of our abilities and came up with our own unfettered opinions. In addition to making up our own minds they made sure that we lived with said opinions too. They may not have liked the liberal paths that my siblings and I chose to walk down, but they loved and cared for us anyway. Friends, well they are a completely different matter altogether.
I was going to name names of political figures who are right leaning but most of you will already know the players in this game. I never had too much of a problem with the right until a few years ago. I did rail and rally the troops against such “sink or swim” or “every man for himself” attitudes but now unfortunately, I feel like it’s a fool’s errand. Mainly because the right (and the left too) have dug in their heels and won’t listen first and debate second.
It just seems like the right wing “leaders” have turned out to be narcissistic, partisan egomaniacs. Spewing their hatred on “social” media platforms all the while lifting from the playbooks of dictators from the early and mid 20th century. This scares me just as much as it angers me.
Herein lies my personal dilemma. I have tried my best to listen and debate but right wing friends insist on name calling and shouting me down. All the while supporting their narcissistic fear mongering leaders. I cannot and will not go down your path. I will do my best to listen to the news and make up my mind but the people who I once called friends I will cut off from now on.
The dilemma I am having is cutting someone off in the first place. I find cutting someone off almost as distasteful as being called names by people who refuse to listen to others with dissenting views. As well as this, they refuse to listen to themselves at how eerily similar this sounds like 1930’s and 40s rhetoric.
Luckily most, if not all, of my immediate family are open to listening and debating instead of name-calling and shouting down dissenting viewpoints to their own. Besides that they are my family and as long as they don’t hurt me or anyone else then I can live with that. However I will not live with “friends” or people that I keep at an arms length. I will not live with “friends” who vote for and/or support these political viewpoints and figures. People like this are enabling the right to continue this hatred by regurgitating their rhetoric and even by voting for them too.
These reasons keep me awake at night and keep me away from the trolling conservatives. Simply put, I don’t have the moral compass to follow them or the moral currency to afford their insensitive, vitriolic and often sexist, racist rants. Call me judgmental if you wish and I can live with that label. I can even live with this sort of ranting from my family too. But for my own sanity and self-preservation I can’t live with these so-called “friends” otherwise known as foes. I call them foes because instead of listening and debating, they name call and argue, neither of which help to diffuse the current loud angry political climate. In fact it hinders and intensifies the daily-shouting matches in the news, the circle of politics, the workplace, all of the “social” media platforms. Not only that but it makes my blood boil and my heart ache, not race, but ache. My heart aches for having to make myself just as insensitive as my former friends now foes.