Not long ago I had a falling out with a friend. The falling out had been a while in the making. I think it started in early August when a woman he might have, kinda, sorta liked asked me to walk her home. He felt snubbed and sent some drunk angry texts to me: “Fuck you too Matte! You’re no friend of mine!” “Phony” “You’re no friend of mine any more seriously.” He apologized the next day and said he was going to stop drinking. He’s done this a few times – said dumb or insensitive things and walked them back the next day. There was a night when we were debating semi-political issues and he went off the rails and made personal attacks against me. He also got weirdly defensive about owning a Rolex. He apologized the next day.
I always forgave him – partially because I try not to take things personally, partially because I have a lot of acquaintances, but not a lot of friends, and partially because I could shrug it off as him being a temperamental drunk . He’s admitted to being a temperamental drunk. I also know that he has some personal problems. It’s easier to be forgiving when you have a sense of someone’s internal daemons. Though as I’ve learned in other relationships, that forgiveness can be taken advantage of and those daemons can become a convenient excuse. Nevertheless, whenever things got dark for him, I always asked if he needed anything. Sometimes, we would talk about how or where he might get some help.
There was a time in our friendship when we’d regularly text each other to hang out at the bar. We’d talk sports or share funny stories or talk about Pennsylvania – he’s from Pennsylvania too. The texts became less regular when he tried sobriety for a few months and even less regular when he ended his dalliance with sobriety. On my evening walks, I’d see him out at other bars. He was no longer asking if I wanted meet up. An even more noticeable change happened after the walking home incident. And now, after the falling out, he never texts and barely says hello if he sees me.
Things really came to a head after the Ch*rlie K!rk incident. My friend began to see anyone who wasn’t overly sorry about it as celebrating it. On one particular night, he came into the bar and said to a group of us (mostly liberals/progressives/democrats), “I guess you’re happy now.” He has a strong tendency to project, exaggerate, and build straw men in his argumentation. Even though he swears he’s not a Tr*mper, many people who know him have called him out on some the comments he’s made. He vehemently defended M*sk after the fascist salute incident.
Like many people I’ve encountered on the right, my former friend can’t or won’t accept that people can condemn political violence and still think the person who was killed wasn’t a good person. There’s a break in his (and their) logic that says, “if I didn’t like the guy, I must have wanted him dead.” Not that my ex-friend would have listened, but the stance I adopted was that K!rk devoted a significant part of his life to tearing others down. Some of his actions (a watch list he created of liberal professors) have directly resulted in people being harassed and receiving death threats. I wasn’t celebrating his death, but I wasn’t about to honor someone who devoted his life to harassing and making life more difficult for others.
The falling out was a pretty heated exchange. If I’m being honest, I wanted to punch the guy. I might have even said as much. I know I felt defensive, and I had good reason to feel that way (he threatened to interfere with a job I was looking at applying for). Most of what he said to me was personal, not political or theoretical, but personal. He seemed to want to turn what he knew about me against me. As an example, I don’t own a TV and I don’t really watch TV. I don’t have any strong feelings one way or another about this, other than to tell people who ask if I watched a certain show, that I don’t do TV and don’t have one. He takes these statements as a criticism of how he lives his life. He’ll say something along the lines of, “oh you think you’re so much better than other people because you don’t have a TV.” He makes similar attacks when I criticize capitalism. He’ll say I should go live in a commune or give up my cell phone. It’s difficult to argue with people who think this way. It’s like talking to a child who resorts to the “if you don’t like it, you should leave” form of argumentation. They seem incapable of understanding that being critical is the first step in trying to improve conditions. A more appropriate statement would be, “if you don’t like it, try to fix it.”
Nevertheless, I felt bad about some of the things I said to him. While usually cool in those moments, I regretted not following my inner zen and simply disengaging. They day after, I apologized – though I had no intended or desired outcome. I was, for the most part, resigned to the end of the friendship. For a few days after the blow up, I found myself wondering how I could do better – not with him, but in general. How could I cultivate friends who inspire and support as opposed to whatever it was he was doing. It was disheartening to have invested in a friendship that had resentment boiling underneath. Resentment is almost always poisonous.
I saw him again two or three weeks ago. A group of us were at one end of the bar, and he sat at the other end. I waved him over, but he refused. He had one drink and left. I saw him one week ago as well. I said hello as I walked back from the bathroom and he asked if I was rooting for the Phillies. Thinking this was usual small talk, I said I was, and he immediately launched into attacks on what a hypocrite I am because I was rooting for a team owned by a billionaire who inherited tobacco money. Then he asked why I don’t personally house the homeless in my apartment as if to say I don’t put my money where my mouth is.
The whole falling out situation makes me a little sad – not so much for the friendship that’s been lost (though there is some sadness for that), but because I feel like I’m watching someone wither up with bitterness and resentment. I’m watching, in real time, what seems to be this radicalization into a MAGA or incel caricature. And unfortunately, he seems caught in a cycle in which he behaves poorly which makes people not want to be around him which, in turn, further fuels his resentment.
As I’ve been considering these events for the past few weeks, I’ve also tried to turn inwards. This isn’t the first relationship or friendship that has been strained by someone else’s insecurities, resentments, and projections, or their desire to not want to be bothered with society’s problems. I can take ownership of that last one. I’m a fairly political person and I want a more just economy and a more compassionate society. I tend to want to push for idealism. Not a lot of people want to have those conversations. They’re inconvenient and require critical self-reflection.
All of this points to something else that is going on and I can’t quite put my finger on it other than to say people seem to be moving towards the extremes. We seem to be caught in a cycle of outrage and reaction, revenge politics and personal grievance.
Last night, I had a conversation with a woman I know but haven’t seen in a while. She lives in the neighborhood. She’s friends with this guy that was my friend. When she sat next to me, she shared something about possibly losing her job – collateral damage from funding cuts and Tr*mp administration policies. I shared my sympathies (it sucks) and said it’s why I’m not a fan of capitalism – it seems too indiscriminate and that only the very well-off are able to weather (or even profit) tough economic times. She happens to like capitalism. She thinks it rewards those who work hard. I said, sometimes it does, but those who have the most seem to have inherited it or had some other leg up (tax breaks, backroom deals, corporate welfare). I also pointed out the rampant racism that has existed. Entire generations of black families were denied inherited wealth when Black Wall Street was burned down. She said that was ages ago and wasn’t relevant. I told her about the practice of redlining which denied black families mortgages and other tools for building wealth. Some of those practices lasted well into the 2000s (not ages ago). When confronted with these inconvenient truths, that capitalism clearly does not work to the benefit of all, she resorted to the argument many people use – why don’t you move. She said I should see how bad it is in third-world countries to which I responded I don’t want to compare us to a third-world country. We say we’re the best and we routinely fail and frequently demonize or most vulnerable people. I want us to be better than that.
While she can’t stand Tr*mp, she also said she used to be liberal, but hates the liberals now. She thinks we’ve gone to far – especially during COVID when we shut everything down (side note: Tr*mp was president when COVID started – though I think she was complaining about blue California). Moreover, as someone who works in the medical profession, she believes the vaccines caused significant harm, that most of the people who died had pre-existing conditions, and that the numbers were inflated. The vaccine conversation was a long one. She borders on being anti-vax, but said she if she had kids, she would get them vaccinated for the standard stuff. She also thinks herd immunity isn’t real. I had to plead ignorance on a few things. I don’t know if US vaccines are different than other countries, but I conceeded that I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that quality is impacted by profitability – which she seemed to suggest, and would weirdly support my argument against unfettered capitalism…
As dicey as the vaccine conversation was, she was also suggesting that it was the liberals who’ve been divisive. She, like my friend, thought liberals were celebrating K!rk’s death, and that liberals are the ones using hateful rhetoric. I said I know a lot of liberals – not one of them celebrated, and while many of them will refer to the current administration as fascists, not one of them wants to see everyday republicans suffer or be eradicated. As an example, I pointed out that Tr*mp has called liberals the enemy within and has called for the rooting out of such people. She wanted me to prove it and when I showed her something from NBC, she said she doesn’t trust them. THIS is the problem we have today. This is why we can’t converse or debate. As best as I can tell, one side refuses to accept verifiable facts.
We eventually agreed to disagree, she bought a round of drinks, we hugged and she left. If I had her number, I might have considered texting her the proof she was looking for. This morning, Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, said, “The Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Again, unless they’re living secret lives, I don’t know a single democrat who is a terrorist, and illegal alien, or a violent criminal.
Which kinda gets me back to the falling out with my friend. Among the bigger problems I see with the progressive / liberal movement, is that it tries to claim the high ground of being accepting of other people and ideas until it gets sucker-punched in the mouth by the right (removing trans rights, removing bodily autonomy for women, saying that we hate America, literally making life harder for millions of people based on ideology). After a while, getting punched in the mouth doesn’t feel so good, and we become a little less tolerant of the people who are doing all the punching. This, then, makes us less accepting which makes us look hypocritical. This is what my friend accused me of – being a hypocrite.
I don’t have a good answer to this, because while I want to listen to their ideas, there is a limit. If I say, on principle, that I believe in free speech, and someone then says all liberals should die, I think it’s fair for me to adjust my stance a bit and say I’m not willing to tolerate that. I don’t know about other people, but I have lots of times when I’m struggling to tell the difference between being compassionate or understanding and being abused. Which is why I think the friendship fell apart. I can say, unequivocally, that I would want good things for this person – or now, at the very least, I don’t wish them any harm. I don’t know that they would say the same thing about me.
So it goes.