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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
That’s quite a bit different from saying we shouldn’t publicly and actively denounce and oppose BLM and its narrative. An ideological and emotional backlash is vital in preventing this country from becoming Venezuela, with conservatives rendered powerless to effectively resist. Any issues resulting from this pale in comparison. Your example is simply the rejection of a specific strategy of confrontation, not a strategic retreat (which is what your post sounded like it was advocating).
Besides, strategic retreat will never be a good idea so long as the majority of the Republican party apparatus view it as an opportunity to surrender.
Maybe the stronger view is to recognize that loss and sorrow are inescapable parts of life.
Princes have loss and sorrow too.
A good country is a terrible thing to waste. I think of all the losses I’ve taken, that the loss of the country that I loved is the hardest.
The loss of my young nephew is the hardest, but I do view this as existing within the same realm of comparison.
The last scene is priceless.
No they haven’t. What is there to fix? What I found true is that if you just go to the site and look for their “What do we believe” statement, you can’t find it. You have to google it, then the page comes up. I looked for a good 30-60 seconds and couldn’t find a link to it on their page. But it’s there if you want to find it.
I think you will agree that Tucker Carlson is providing a good chunk of that “ideological and emotional backlash” right now. How’s that working out for, say, his show’s advertising sales staff right now?
Better than it would if he allowed this BS (from both parties) to go on unchallenged, and then tried to oppose it later. The brownshirts would do the same thing, from a stronger position:
He also wouldn’t have had half of the audience he does now, as he would lack all credibility for not speaking out earlier.
@spin, I’m really sorry that happened to your daughter and I know your heart bleeds for her because you’re her father and frankly my heart bleeds a little too. One is always tempted to say, “well, those two weren’t her real friends,” but that doesn’t help and I’m not even sure that it would be accurate; they’re young, perhaps they aren’t strong enough to be loyal, or perhaps politics will always come first. Anyway, I’m sorry she was treated so cruelly by people she trusted.
Well, their own text says they aren’t real friends. They may reconsider, but, I’d encourage her not to burn bridges, or wait.
If they are being eaten alive by the left, that is when they will remember her. Then she’d have to wonder if that was true.
Betrayal is not an easy thing to resolve.
Hopefully she still has other friends and family.
I’m worried about this belligerent BLM attitude when we are back to school. For both staff and students.
The bridges are burned. Yesterday the girl told my daughter that she “…believes anything your dad shoves up your [expletive].”
Teenagers with reason are like that chimpanzee with the AK-47: they’ve got it, but they have no idea how to use it.
Oh, I’d missed that.
I listened to Rush and Zep when I was a teenager, which is why I thought it was cool to yell, “Disco sucks!” out the window when I was picking up my brother at the local dance emporium teen night.
Which was not nice on many levels.
I guess she thinks that doubling down makes her point stronger. So sad.
Kids these days!
Yet disco continues to suck.
Yet, somehow I’ve become quite the ABBA fan, and some of the BeeGees stuff, and other disco tunes when they get played on SiriusXM 70s.
I was so sure of myself back then.
I worry too, but if teachers start getting shouted down they will mostly have themselves to blame; the importance of feelings, the right to attack ‘bullies’, truth-to-power, ‘systemic racism’, check-your-privilege, no justice/no peace – if the culmination of all of these lessons is the destruction of your teachers, shouldn’t you get an ‘A’?
~hastily scrubs his playlist before he can be outed~
And with that one scene in the movie Stripes, I knew that our long national nightmare was coming to a close.
At least these groups produced what qualified as music. Today with computerized voice manipulation I feel as if I’m listening to robots impersonating human song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtsQI2IeM5U
ABBA did a lot of stuff that wasn’t disco. The Bee Gees, not so much.
The Bee Gees did about a dozen albums prior to the Disco era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_Gees#Discography
“How a post about losing friends over politics turned in to a history lesson about disco” – That’s Soooo Ricochet!
First 45 I bought was How Can You Mend A Broken Heart haha