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On Losing More Friends
On Sunday, there was a large gathering of BLM protesters in my little town of Lynden, WA. A lot of us who don’t toe that particular line were mildly nervous about how it’d go, but it went fine. Some counter protesters, Trump supporters and flag wavers, etc.
My daughter, a brash young woman if ever there was one, decided to drive by the protesters with her Keep America Great hat on, and the national anthem playing loudly. Apparently, this effrontery was much too much for a couple of her “good” friends. Within minutes she had a text: “On behalf of [nitwit] and I, you are no longer our friend. The national anthem is disgusting, and driving past us with your Trump hat on is disgusting.” Or some such nonsense.
I told our daughter: Good for you for standing up for what you believe in! I reminded her that standing up for what you believe in will always cost you something. Unfortunately and often it costs you relationships with friends and family. She didn’t quite understand why someone would react that way. She knew her two friends had gone to the BLM rally, and they’d even had discussions on the topic. But she was not “unfriending” them. I explained to her: Some people are very fragile in what they believe. Because they are fragile, they cannot tolerate others not agreeing with them, much less people actively arguing against their views. I reminded her of a liberal friend of mine. I said, “We don’t agree on much of anything, politically. But we are still friends. We are brothers in Christ, and we know that each other’s view on political matters is the result of our commitment to Christ, each of us in our own way. We have built a trust in each other that rests on the foundation of Christ. That supersede’s our political disagreement. We are both firm enough in our convictions that we can stand to disagree with each other. And in fact, we value that disagreement because it sharpens both of us.”
I am not troubled by COVID, nor by protesters, nor counter-protestors, nor by police, nor by Joe Biden, nor by Trump. I AM troubled as I watch our nation divide even more sharply over something which, when you get right down to it, we don’t disagree.
Published in General
Or the lack of depth of thinking.
I disagree. Mostly, this is because of all the writings of the anti-communist survivors who say that this totalitarian brainwashing and thought control is designed to to be insidious and incremental, and it has worked in many other countries.
Did you get your Panamera?
As long as the “Intellectual Dark Web” of rational liberals continue to speak out against the Forces Of Woke, I wouldn’t completely hate it if “Known Conservatives” toned down the volume a little. We (presumably) support the continued existence of the IDW, but anything tolerated by KCs is automatically targeted for elimination. If anything, KCs should be complaining about the IDW in order to give those folk more oxygen!
This is partly why I like to post complaints about Jordan Peterson’s wholesale dismissal of postmodernism when I contend that his whole philosophy is itself a postmodern one. If KCs start to complain about Peterson then maybe the Forces Of Woke will start to defend him!
;-)
Alinsky’s evil geniusing aside, BLM is unassailable because it is so heavily conflated with blm. The particulars of a given death of a black man at the hands of a white or honorary white man may turn out to show that the death was justified, but there are enough other examples that the narrative will survive.
I would like to oppose nonsense, but as the saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they weren’t reasoned into. That goes double for people in groups and triple for zealots.
Sometimes it’s worth fighting even if you can’t win, but usually it’s best to save your strength until you can win.
Ah, but anti-communist survivors are not necessarily conservatives, which means when they speak out it much more helpful to lovers of liberty than it is when “Known Conservatives” speak out on the same topic. We need to find ways to provide as much oxygen as possible for non-conservatives who are speaking out against The Current Moment, without tarring them with the (completely unfair) baggage that comes from being a “Known Conservative”. For example, I’m not convinced that it’s helpful in the long run when a non-conservative does a Prager University video.
Quibble: One must work to gather strength until one can win.
Spin,
Great daughter, Great father!
Regards,
Jim
That verse got dropped during World War II, when we were allied with the hirelings and slaves.
After giving this a lot of thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are ripe for the entry of a strong third party, a constitutional party that rejects the anarchy of the left and, at the same time, rejects the kneelers on the right who sit silently by watching the left destroy our cities and corrupt our children with inaccurate revisions of history. One would think the Republicans could fill that role, but it seems many of us prefer to stay above the fray, afraid to wear a MAGA hat or even put a GOP sticker on our cars for fear that it will incur damage at the hands of one of the thugs on the left. By the same token, there must be those silent Democrats who still vote D as their parents did but don’t like the direction it has taken in the last few years.
Sorry to be uninitiated, but I don’t understand your comment. What’s (or who are) a known conservative?
Define ‘dropped’. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really feel responsible for the off-verses of a song written almost a quarter of a millennium ago. Nevertheless, there are those who make a Big Biden Deal out of this and I would like to know if the Official Song was Officially Abbreviated or if we just quit singing the verse because it was time to play baseball already.
Newspapers used to publish the lyrics every Fourth of July, but the third verse was dropped. I heard that this was due to some act of Congress, but now can’t find a cite.
Another thought: I’ve found that I’ve reconnected with people I had written off long ago because it turns out that they’re just as disturbed by The Current Moment as I am, if not more so! Heck, I often find I’m the one bringing up moderate counterpoints to poorly-reasoned anti-SJW hyperbole.
Daughter’s dilemma is that she’s still young and she hasn’t yet lost touch with old friends who will come to their senses after they’ve aged a bit.
There have always been quite a few teenagers who will drop a friend because he/she wears the wrong brand of clothes, or listens to the wrong kind of music, or whatever. A lot of the political behavior is the same sort of thing, people attempting to be members of an in-group which putting down members of the out-group. Milan Kundera called it ‘circle dancing.’
And yes, as someone pointed out above, this sort of thing is generally harder on girls than on boys.
It’s hard to maintain a friendship with someone perceived to be a threat.
For better or worse, this is how I’ve come to see those on the political left — including my own friends and acquaintances. Most, yes, aren’t bomb-throwing radicals. But does it really matter? They’ll yield to the bomb-throwing radicals in every possible circumstance, so what difference does it make? Useful idiots are still idiots. Useful idiots are the magic ingredient in the totalitarian stew.
I’ve grown up around these people. I went to school with them. The thought of being governed by them fills me with unalloyed terror. But I will be governed by them. I’m 24. Unlike some of you lucky Ricochetti — you who came of age in optimistic times — I’ll have to live in the hell my own generation is creating (or worsening, if you accept the anti-Boomer thesis).
Add me to the ever-growing list of twenty-something sad sacks who believe the American dream is dead. Why would I want to befriend the very people who killed it?
Nobody sees their own time as being particularly optimistic at the time. It only seems that way in hindsight. Take it from somebody who came of age in the time of grunge, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Rodney King, OJ Simpson, anti-globalization protests, Adbusters Magazine, peak Noam Chomsky, peak Michael Moore, etc.
If history repeats itself, thirty years from now you’ll almost certainly be told by a member of that era’s youth that you were lucky to come of age in such an optimistic era.
Hmm. You’ve proven that I belong to the second generation to channel most of its talents into wallowing in misery.
Maybe wallowing in misery is an inevitable feature of generations born after the communication revolution of the mid-twentieth century.
Oh, sure. But things really will be that much worse.
Not even close. I grew up thinking the 1960s were a time of great optimism, but they also had seemingly endless race riots, the assassination of a beloved president, the assassination of a beloved presidential candidate, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, constant fear of nuclear war, literally thousands of domestic terrorist bombings, etc.
The 1970s generation looked at the 1950s as a time of optimism, but in the 1950s they had the Beatniks, the Korean War, juvenile delinquency, McCarthyism, Cold War paranoia, etc.
Read all the hip authors from the 1920s. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Waugh, etc. It was all self-pity and lamentations about the rotten state of the world, and that was during a massive economic boom!
I don’t think anybody looks back at the 1970s as a time of optimism, so that generation may be forgiven for wallowing in self-pity, but they’re the ones who got rich in the 1980s!
Oh, the 1980s. What an optimistic time! The Day After. Amerika . Airliner hijackings and airliner bombings. The crack epidemic. AIDS. The Ethiopian famine. Such optimism!
The generation with the most right to complain is the one that had to endure BOTH the Great Depression AND World War Two. They’re the ones who really got shafted.
Relevant: my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism
In fifth grade, I think it was, our teacher asked the class: Would you prefer to have been raised a prince and then to become a commoner, or never to have been a prince at all and never know what you had lost?
I couldn’t answer that question then, and I still can’t answer it now. But at the time, I felt that memory of once-greatness would assuage the loss. But now I wonder if the loss of what once was is perhaps the greater sorrow.
The problem being, of course, that they don’t actually believe it.
If a lot of them vote Trump this year instead of Biden, that would help.
some of my friends refuse to talk about BLM.
I told them to go the BLM website and read their mission statement.
Spin’s daughter’s ex-friends should do the same.
They may have fixed it by now.
I firmly believe that countering propaganda is the most pressing issue today. Think of the empire of influence pushers aimed at us and our kids today: the mainstream media, social media, TV programs, corporation policies,teachers’ unions, newspapers, all spew left propaganda. Communism for Kids is #22 in Amazon’s books for children. Not to mention all the dystopian young adult books. I recently said to a teen grand niece that I thought a picture was beautiful. She responded with great authority, “There is no beauty!” I also understand that the 1619 curriculum is going into 3000 school districts across the country.
I often wonder what Hitler would have accomplished if he had all the propaganda outlets available to him that we have today. He curtailed free speech and then we all know \what he was able to pull off with schools, radio, film and newspapers. Would there even be one Jew alive today? I don’t know.
Is it a luxury to debate if we should push back? I think it is, but don’t look to me for suggestions on how. I sit here half-blind in my wheelchair and, though I do feel the necessity to act, I don’t know what to do. Oh… except one thing: vote for Trump.
The one thing that Gary Robbins and many others, will not do.
The Germans made a good movie about this.