How Right-Wingnuts destroy friendships

[marcus]

I saw this on another newsgroup. It was written in 2006:





How The Wingnuts Destroyed My Best Friend
by NickM

Dan and I first became friends back in Indian Guides (a non-PC version
of
the Cub Scouts for first and second graders) back in 1975 when I we
were 6
years old or thereabouts. We remained friends after that for more
than 25
years. Because of our friendship, Dan's family and my family also
became
good friends, and I attended countless family events for not only Dan
but
for his sisters and other family members. I attended his and his
sisters'
graduation parties from high school and college, and vice versa. I
went to
his grandmother's funeral, he he came to those for my grandmothers.
One
college summer, Dan got me a job working in an office where he worked,
where
we had fun making fun of our managers and blowing off steam with our
co-workers at the local pub after work. When I got married in 1998,
Dan
was my best man; when he got married in 2001, I was his.


NickM's diary :: ::


This despite the fact that Dan and I were seemingly incompatable. I
was,
as a kid, skinny, bookish, intense and shy. Dan was chubby, friendly
and
outgoing. But in spite of that, or perhaps because we complemented
each
other so well, we became good friends.
Our differences extended to our political views; he was conservative
and I
was very liberal. We engaged in endless debates on Reagan, Bush I,
and
Clinton. I first heard of Rush Limbaugh from Dan, probably back
around
1993, and he once took me to a restaurant at lunchtime where they
played
Limbaugh's show. The meal was very good - we both really loved
Portuguese
garlic shrimp - but Limbaugh was enough to give me indigestion.
No matter, though, because Dan and I had enough other things in common
to
make our disagreements on politics relatively unimportant. When we
were
kids, we both loved exploring in the woods behind our houses. We
both
loved history. As a teenager, we both got into "war games", and
spent too
many hours moving little cardboard chits around maps of Gettysburg
and
Normandy. After college, we were both a bit adrift and somewhat
lonely,
and spent too much time hanging out in bars, perfecting our pool games
and
striking out with the ladies. Even after I went off to a far-off
city for
graduate school, Dan would come visit me and my then-girlfriend (now
wife)
and we'd all go out together and have a great time hitting the bars.
At some point during the Clinton impeachment mess, though, I found it
more
and more difficult to talk to Dan about politics. There was such a
blind
intransigence developing, such an anger that bore little relation to
an
actual, reasonable assessment of what was going on, that I soon
started to
feel that political debates - long a fun mainstay of our relationship
- were
becoming too emotionally fraught. There was increasingly
awkwardness when
we shifted from talking about Clinton, about which we didn't agree,
to
talking about the Yankees, about which we did. And I felt like it
was not
really my fault. I wasn't approaching these discussions from a place
of
deep anger, but Dan always seemed to. I could never really
understand why
that was - Clinton was really pretty moderate. One might reasonably
dislike his politics, I guess, without feeling that he represented an
imminent threat to the Constitution or America.
But I was willing to let it slide, because we had been friends for so
long,
and because that unreasonableness never extended to anything else: Dan
was
generous to a fault, would almost literally give you the shirt off his
back,
and he was genuinely a nice guy. So while we started to edge around
the
subject of politics, even as it was becoming more important to both of
us,
we remained good friends.
But somewhere the friendship was starting to unravel. More and
more,
during telephone conversations, it felt like there was an enormous
elephant
in the room that neither of us could discuss. Whenever I would
(ill-advisedly) broach the subject of politics, I found that Dan was
becoming more and more entrenched in views
that seemed rigid, extreme and just unlike him, with his friendly,
easygoing
nature. He was having trouble finding a girlfriend, and while I
could
completely relate to that, his interpretation of his situation was
becoming
less and less based on personal assessments and more and more
political,
which I couldn't understand.
Men and women have always had problems with one another, even before
Hillary
came along, and it was becoming difficult to relate to someone who
incrementally was losing sight of that fact and growing somehow
suspicious
of women as women.
The final straw started in an innocent way, probably sometime in
2002.
Someone Dan and I both knew from high school sent a whole group of
high
school acquaintances, including us, one of those idiotic spammy e-
mails
about the Pledge of Allegiance. The gist of it was that liberals
were
sticking their big noses where they didn't belong and foolishly, in
their PC
way, trying to get rid of public acknowledgement of God. The e-mail
was
poorly written and not well thought-out. At the same time, though,
it
wasn't hateful or despicable, just kind of dumb.
So I wrote back a reply to the group, taking what I thought was a
very
reasonable, polite and common sense approach, because I knew I was
going to
be arguing against what everyone else perceived as the reasonable
position.
I pointed out that few liberals really cared about this issue, but
that the
facts about it should be stated correctly. In a brief paragraph, I
corrected a wrong statement in the original article about the origin
of the
pledge, which did not contain "Under God," and wrote (including a
link)
about how those words got added in the 1950's. I pointed out that,
contrary to the article, our money has not always had "In God We
Trust" on
it, and included a neat link to a coin-collectors web site that had
pictured
demonstrating this (noting that there were all sorts of pictures of
neat
coins there). Finally, I closed with a simple statement that I was
glad to
live in a country that - unlike places like Iran - allowed me to think
for
myself about the deepest and more important issues in life, rather
than
telling me what to think.
What my friend wrote back to the group stunned me and effectively
ended our
friendship. He started out by saying that while liberals always try
to
confuse issues by referencing the Federalist Papers and Magna Carta
(which I
didn't), the case was simple. Liberals hate God and God-fearing
Americans.
They are trying, he wrote, to push a sick and warped agenda to
children -
eliminating God from schools while advocating elementary school sex-
ed
courses about (I'll never forget this) "rimming, fisting and
homosexuality"
(?!?) It was all part of a conspiratorial plan to turn America into
a
modern-day anything-goes, Sodom, and Americans needed to wake up to
liberals
and their insidious plans.
Dan's response was so over-the-top and hateful I was stunned. The
"liberal" in this conversation was ME - and he knew me - and really
well, I
thought. I didn't have ulterior motives, I love my country, I don't
hate
"God" (I'm very active in my Unitarian Church!), and I even had to
ask
around to find out what "rimming" was! I couldn't believe that Dan
would
write things like that, essentially about me, and distribute it to a
bunch
of people I had grown up with. Worst of all, the hatred and anger
was out
of control, and the smear method was strict out-of-the-book
conservative
demonization tactics.
I couldn't really talk to Dan after that. Something essential had
been
broken - I guess it was a sense of trust. I called him a few times
after
that, but didn't have much to say. Dan had somehow really changed,
right
under my nose, without me fully realizing or noticing it. I don't
doubt
that some sort of personal problem might have played a role in this,
and
maybe, had I been a more attentive friend, I might have been able to
notice
it and talk to him about it. But I knew, regardless of what prompted
it,
that I couldn't be friends any more with someone who had so much hate
based
on nothing more than ideology.
I miss Dan, I must admit - we stopped being friends after almost 30
years.
But I also feel like it wasn't really my fault that our friendship
fell
apart over politics. It was probably his fault - but at the same
time, I
also blame the Dobsons, the Robertsons, the Coulters, the Limbaughs,
the
DeLays, the Roves - all those people who are intent on turning America
into
a place where you can't be friends with people who don't vote the way
you
do. And down this road lies ruin - because if Dan couldn't see the
humanity of his friend of thirty years, what hope do we have of
bringing
together our country?

[marcus]

First of all, I'm assuming this was an actual account by NickM, as it
sounds
authentic, and the person writing doesn't go over-the-top or rant
with
any of his own conspiracy theories. 2006 isn't all that long ago, and
the hatred of the rightwing fear mongers maybe worse now, but it was
pretty bad three years ago.


Personally, I had three relationships go down the tubes in the post
9/11/pre-
emptive attack on Iraq era. Granted, two of the three, weren't as
close as the relationship described in the initial post of this
thread, but one of them was a guy I worked with for about 7 years in
the late 1970s through the mid 1980s. He was like the "Dan"
character. He was conservative, I was liberal, but during our
working
career, we had friendly disagreements, but never out and out fights,
or name calling. We saw each other socially...our wives became
friends. We went over each other's homes, ate togther, went out to
restaurants and movies and shows. We even saw George Carlin in
person, and the first Richard Pryor concert movie, and laughed our
asses off at both.


He and his wife moved away in the mid-80s for a better job situation
for both. We saw each other infrequently, but kept in touch. He had
a traumatic health issue, and I was there for him, and I had one a
few years later, and he was there for me.


Admittedly, as the 90s wore on, we did lose touch with another...his
wife and he divorced...however, we were always civil. I had dinner
with him when he visited my town a few months after 9/11...we didn't
really discuss the terrorist attacks that much...just enough to
acknowledge the horror and senselessness of it all. By then, he had
remarried, and seemed happy personally. However, he was starting to
quote Limbaugh and other right-wing personalities in his emails to
me,
and I noticed a more narrow political view than before.


Well, let me come to the point of this. Similarly to the person who
posted the story about his friend, Dan, there came an email that I
refuted. It had to do with the build-up of the Bush/Cheney efforts
to
get Americans in line for the upcoming war against Iraq. This would
have been around the Fall of 2002. I pointed out that Iraq was not
to
blame for 9/11, that Saddam had complied with the weapons inspectors,
and that many intelligence experts doubted the Bush/Cheney claims of
"weapons of mass destruction" and nuclear weapons in Iraq.


Apparently, that was the straw that broke the camel's back with my
friend. He sent me the most hateful, completely out of character,
personal attack I've ever received in an email. It was almost book-
length. I couldn't believe that this was the same guy. He called me
an "appeaser", that all "Arabs are alike" and that we need to kill
them before they kill us, and that if people like me had prevailed in
Europe during the 1940s, his grandparents might have been killed in a
Concentration Camp.


I wrote back a very concerned email, but stood my ground, and told
him
how shocked I was. He replied with the same vitriol as his first
email. I decided then and there that I didn't want to have anything
to do with him, told him so, and blocked him from sending me emails.


That was 7 yrs ago, and unlike the guy who wrote about Dan, I don't
miss this guy.


He is symbolic of what has happened to witless people who believe the
Hannitys, Becks, Limbaughs and Coulters of this nation.


I also lost the friendship of two other people, who I wasn't as close
with as the man I described above. One was another old coworker, who
accused me of being a "Palestinian apologist" when I dared to suggest
that Israel might not always be correct in its policies. The other
was my wife's cousin, who also during the build-up and pre-emptive
attack on Iraq, chastised me in very foul language that this(Iraq)
wasn't like Vietnam...that the Iraq war was a noble cause.


I feel badly that my old coworker refuses to speak or email me, as
for
my wife's cousin, she is a moron...so I don't miss her...and neither
does my wife.

[Pearlie]

Wow!