Dear Ray,
We just spent five hours together. You were kind enough to host us for a Fourth of July potluck around your fire pit, our teenage kids mingling, running, and laughing while shooting off rockets and smoke bombs, before separating back to their neutral phone corners. Our kids grew up together, we’ve done countless school fundraisers and gatherings, we’ve battled dumb policies at large gymnasium rallies, I the insider teacher, you the freaky sculptor, cabinet maker, stay-at-home dad, wife a marketing executive, and we always ending up together, schmoozing about our dreams and the other square parents.
You saw me wrecked by leftists, our livelihood and reputation scattered, and you watched us leave the left. You saw Black Lives Matter attack my wife, our kids, and me, you saw the R word stuck to me like fly strip, you watched me comply to threats and hush up, labeled problematic and radioactive, shunned out of all political gatherings. You watched us go penniless, and saw me stalked from the bottom to the top of Minnesota. You see me now, a pensioner. We can’t take vacations. We are dead to that old school tribe.
You listened to me — again — speak of our new little circle of friends. As you and I drift apart in careful, cherry-picked conversation, you hold back and I hold back.
I withhold mentioning that our old crew of leftists have skidded further left, like California to the ocean, into “fuck-them” platitudes.
You know: “Fuck Republicans and the White Privilege they rode in on, the Anti-Choice, Anti-Roe Karens, the Bret Kavanaughs, the January 6 and Trump apologists. The ones who excuse cops’ sanctioned murders, and white male mass shooters but blame black people for a couple of bad gun choices (‘What can they do, the community’s hurting’), or for claiming that George Floyd or Trayvon or Mike Brown didn’t die because they were black.”
Maybe, you’re saying, “I have had it up to my damn eyeballs with Theo constantly smacking the daily memo aside. Yes, we have terrible, cynical, corporate media, but Trevor Noah is right-on. And there’s a reason why the media has shaded left: because black folx are hurting! Trans kids are literally dying. If Theo keeps smacking the narrative aside, kids for sure should doubt the gender binary.”
You don’t really have a plan for a United States, but keep the fire of revolution hot. ACAB. You snap at me, “Theo, stop saying, ‘What is a woman?’ It’s not funny.”
I tell you, girls at the hospital where I used to work identify as thirteen year old furry unicorns, wrap their breasts and grow Adam’s apples; that under our hospital’s legal policy, a parent’s daughter who has been raped can wake up sharing a hospital room with a penis. It’s codified. Mom doesn’t get to know. You’re always, “Yeah, but Theo.” Yeah but Theo, yeah but Theo.
How do you keep flying your leftist flags, In This House We Believe .. No Human Is Illegal. Crusty old Black Lives Matter and Justice 4 George Floyd?
How? You are both devout Unitarians who belong to a froufrou plant sharing cooperative and grow exotic green things with huge jagged leaves. Your kids raise chickens and you’re vegan.
I’ll go all HAM with hyperbole now. How do you square that Progress Pride flag and little black signs in the front yard, with thousands of bodies of radical centrists bagged up, sprinkled with lye, and stacked in mass graves? Hear me? Yeah, turbo hyperbole. But if I am dead to my country, robbed of honor and a living, if I have no way out but suicide, yet somehow I keep breathing, above ground, no body bag, and no sprinkled lye, how do we talk? Why should we talk? There are masses of good-as-dead Skeptics like me, a teacher fired at every school because he wouldn’t say a pronoun, or he questioned a million dollars for DEI. There are dead professors at every college. Equity drives the military, cities with 7,000,000 or 20,000 populations, every boardroom, gas station, campus, and school. You’re not escaping DEI by sending your kids to a charter or private school. Nor Catholic schools in Minnesota. They’re all, in greater or lesser parts, drunk or tipsy on equity.
I’m not telling you how to live your life. We can go on socializing and keeping it fake, sad though that is. But I don’t like it, and you shouldn’t either. But as we stand here, there is a yawning gap between us. You have your chickens, your Subaru, your community and stolid beliefs: “Harry Potter is fine without its author.”
But I can’t stand across the gap and keep up the chit-chat. It’s killing me.
Yours always,
Theo
This is sad. Two “friends” whose relationship has frayed apart. Why? Because neither is willing or able to fully validate the other’s life experience, the experience that forms the basis of each person’s world view? At one time, did your experiences run parallel and thus your world views? If so, likewise did your experiences diverge so drastically that it has now become too difficult to embrace those differences? The gap too wide to bridge?
Politics aside, what is going on here on the most basic level? Want for Compassion, the ability to bear the suffering of another as if it were one’s own?
So many questions…