I'm not going where you're going

I'm not staying where you're staying

This is a reflection on the loss of most of my friends over the past six years. It’s particularly about the strained, probably-ready-to-snap connections that are left with a very small number of people who have been my real life friends for decades.

It’s going here because I don’t have the energy (maybe I don’t have the courage) to have any more “meaningful, but hard” conversations with friends. The world served up plenty of those to me in these six years. My biggest task was exorcising my abusive mother from my life.

What I didn’t know was that that exorcism would also chase out most (not all) of my former liberal politics and world view. That led to the loss of friendships and “friendships” (the online variety).

Now we’ve been through three years of a fake pandemic—the virus was real, the “mortal danger to everyone on earth” was not—and three years of seeing that the Democratic party is authoritarian to its core.

We’ve had years of increasingly vulgar, and then vile, and then predatory, incursions of personality disordered “trans” people and their allies. They have succeeded. The White House, all major medical organizations, all media, now support sexual and genital mutilation of children. These monsters call it “gender affirming care”.

We’ve had years of seeing proof that if one is black, trans, a feminist, a leftie, or any other favored group, one is allowed to lie, cheat, steal, get people fired, take positions in colleges and corporations that one has no qualifications for and certainly no moral right to occupy.

We can see now that powerful white people are using “people of color” to wage war against ordinary, work-a-day white American families.

Yet, still, I have friends who act like none of this is real. Friends with whom I’ve shared my most intimate secrets. Friends who have been there for me at the worst times of my life. Friends with whom I have exchanged love.

Those phone calls have more silence than speech now. I can hear my friends not saying things because they’re still living in Liberal Land, and they don’t want to tell me they think I’m a crazy rightwing nut.

You’re not fooling me. I can hear what you think through the silence.

Here’s how it is.

I’m not going where you’re going. I’m not joining you on the candy-colored bus that promises you that the liberalism can be saved. I won’t sit next to you while you put noise-canceling headphones on to drown out what you know is true.

Kids today are not all right. They’re not a shining beacon for the future. They’re neglected, abused, mis-educated, and they’re being turned into selfish, ignorant narcissists. It is not their fault, but the denials from some of my closest friends about the state of today’s youth is too much for me to take.

Systemic racism isn’t real. Patriarchy in the West isn’t real. Homophobia ceased to be a serious threat within the past two decades (but it’s coming back now because of those of you who won’t rein in the freaks).

I’m not staying where you’re staying. I won’t rent property in the fantasy world you won’t give up. The public schools can’t be rescued. Minority groups cannot be welfare-stated into self-sufficiency.

To those friends who might read this and see themselves in it—I love you, but I’m not staying. I’m not staying because I will not live in lies the way you will. And that you are willing to live there has broken my trust in you.

There’s no going back.