Ended a friendship today.

[cer7711]

47. You Did the Right Thing

Last edited Sun Jan 20, 2013, 02:01 AM - Edit history (4)

I, too, have ended personal friendships with ardent right-wingers. One I had known for over 20 years. This man--a very smart man in some ways, I might add (IT professional)--was gleefully, gigglingly happy over the amount of guns and ammo being sold after Obama first won office (yeah, that long ago). His reaction revolted, chilled and sickened me. The hair prickled on my forearms and the back of my neck as I distinctly remember saying to myself, "This is what sitting in the presence of evil feels like."

The thing is he's not a white guy but an American of Chinese ethnicity who listens to El Rusbo, Hannity, O'Reilly, et. al. (Which explains everything and nothing. Why can't these listeners/viewers see through the right's hate-mongering BS?)

We got into a spirited discussion about the reality/non-reality of global climate change a day or two later.

Just before the discussion ended I asked him: "Tell me something, Mr. X. I've given you facts, cited the opinions of respected scientific authorities, provided verifiable hard data and explained to you, in detail, why and how GCC is occurring. Yet still you insist it's 'all a hoax.' So what would it take to change your mind?"

He barked out some nonsense and I said, "No, I'm completely serious. Let's say I have it all wrong. Let's assume for the sake of argument that everything I just told you is incorrect and/or misrepresented and/or objectively false or otherwise in error. What additional or alternate set of verifiable, objective facts would cause you to change your mind on this issue?"

He answered, with some heat, "Nothing! I will never change my opinion on this issue because it's all lefty, enviro-fascist nonsense."

I set my iced tea down carefully and studied him for a moment. "What you just said, Mr. X., proves that you do not have an open, rational mind on this topic. You have erected a 'reality-impermeable' barrier in your mind through which no facts can pass. In short, yours is a religious conviction, not an informed opinion. And you do not have the right to be ignorant and willfully-stupid on this issue, given that you are, in most other respects, a man of great intelligence and wisdom. The stakes are too high. The time to fix things may already be too late. It is willful stupidity like your own which may have already condemned the human race to extinction in the very infancy of its lifespan."

I ended our friendship the next day, cutting off all further personal contact. Painful, yes--but sometimes the only way to communicate the level of horror and dismay we feel to these ardent right-wingers is to punish them for maintaining a paranoiac, facts-impermeable, reality-distortion bubble around themselves. Yes, there is a frightened, squawking, ID-dominate child within that bubble--who may then fall even deeper in thrall to hostile, hate-mongering forces who reinforce that bubble--but the ultimate responsibility for that moral failing is their own, not ours. The social sanction of "shunning" may, in fact, be the only thing that gets through to these people. And you--like me, like others--are under no obligation to literally spend the rest of our own lives in fruitless, irritating, circular, ridiculous argument with hateful, reality-denying people.

Life is too short. And we owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to spend more quality time with our own.