He likes Trump and has a massive gun collection. But we're all more than our political beliefs. Including even WWII Nazis. And ex-boyfriends.
“I’m now the highest level of NRA member you can possibly be,” George told me over sushi recently in Canton, Ohio. “I’m a Patron. That’s Charlton Heston-level.”
As we exited the car going on a ‘hooch run’ afterward I said, “I’m okay with responsible people having guns. What I’m against is idiots with guns. My problem with the NRA is they’re in favor of idiots with guns.”
George didn’t respond. I don’t know if he agreed or he just didn’t want to get into it but I suspect the former. He’s heard it before. We’ve been talking for awhile.
We dated during my college freshman year. There was an early weird little love triangle between he and I and a friend who had a big thing for him; we vied for his attention and I won, but later, they married, as I knew they would after I broke up with him. I never reached out earlier because I thought I should leave them alone. Now I’m sorry I didn’t because a few years ago she passed away, so I wrote George a condolence letter and a few days later he called me. I wish I could have talked to Diane too before she died.
George has changed since 1982. As have I.
The partisan divide
Some ‘liberals’ believe I should hate George, a Trump supporter, although he doesn’t bring him up a lot. He became a Ronald Reagan fan post-me. As dumbass college kids at a Kent State University satellite campus, we were all mostly liberal and beer-soaked. If he held conservative views back then, he kept them to himself.
George has amassed a prodigious amount of guns and in fact, when Diane died, his family and friends worried he might shoot himself. George and I would never have cut it even if I’d been inclined to marriage at the tender age of 19. Diane was his unquestionable soulmate. His young commitment to marriage was perhaps an early sign of his incipient conservatism; I, on the other hand, was an emerging ‘80s hippie chick who romanticized the ‘60s, who preferred to play the field.
When I finally was ready to settle down no one wanted either me or marriage anymore. I never saw that coming.
Now, forty years later, Americans hate each other with not-so-Civil War loathing, and if you disagree with a friend on anything you’re supposed to disavow and spit on their memory, because differing opinions harbor pure evil.
I’ve been working to embrace or at least accept people who don’t agree with me. Grow Some Labia has evolved from helping women avoid or reject domestic abuse and male control to exploring the culture wars and how to bring people together again. Which especially means learning how to come together on what they agree on and leaving the rest at home.
Now I encourage my fellow libs to come together with right-wingers—and vice-versa—in service to our own mutually agreeable goals: To limit ‘trans rights’ in places where male bodies don’t belong and put an end to kiddie sex change operations.
They’re modest demands, but transactivists aren’t famous for their common sense or compromise. The right isn’t famous for its commitment to science, but it’s on the correct side of it for a change.
Instead of defining George as a ‘fascist’ (i.e., conservative), and myself as a liberal angel, I sought common ground. I have a history with George. He was a good guy when he was 19, and he still is, having loved his wife passionately and having raised three fine and all-married sons.
The more I explore t’other side of the partisan divide, the more I see ways in which liberal thought and policy has tempered some of the less laudable conservative impulses and treatment of others. I see, too, how conservative thought needs to do the same for the excesses of liberalism, which has resulted in kaffiyeh-clad Nazis terrorizing Jews, and a lack of commitment to marriage and a two-parent family that looks a lot less avant-garde than it was when I was a hormonally-charged college student with a wandering eye.
So hanging with my Republican, gun-loving ex-boyfriend for a few hours was an opportunity to spend time with someone I didn’t always agree with, but who wasn’t evil because, well, geez, I don’t date evil people!
Mending fences: Start with a friend
To work on de-partisanizing yourself (is that even a word?), it’s not advisable to visit a Trump rally or your city’s Pride parade. There’s testing the waters, and then there’s jumping into a political riptide.
If George was a hardcore Trumper, full MAGA and screaming about immigrants as though any immigrant sounded the death knell for the white race, I couldn’t be friends with him. It’s near-impossible to be friends with anyone whose disagreements outnumber agreements, although I guess never say never. Maybe I’ll one day be so Buddhist that I can see the good in everyone no matter who they are. I strive for it. To remind myself that we’re all flawed, and we don’t always recognize that. I know I can be judgemental. The first step, as we all know, is acknowledging the problem, like they tell you in AA.
Where I may go one day to find common ground is with my bitter, lifelong enemies the Christian fundamentalists. Even so, I’ve been friends with highly conservative Christians. Why? Because I knew them first as friends, and later as Christians.
Decades ago I discovered people I ‘knew’ to be ‘horrible’—weren’t, when we met IRL. In the ‘90s I wrote for a small, free alternative newspaper in northwest Connecticut, as did many conservatives and born-again Christians. We regularly did battle in its pages. I ‘knew’ they were horrible, awful people I had to set straight. Then one Christmas, the paper organized a party and I met several of them.
They weren’t as monstrous as I’d imagined.
Not even Sam, the literalist, women-should-be-submissive-to-men Bible thumper and self-admitted virgin. He was always going on about his struggles not to masturbate and how women should be subservient to men because God sez so. It was harder to hate him when I spoke to a roly-poly forty-year-old dork whose hostility to female independence might not have been entirely Bible-based.
He’s married today, with a stepchild, to a Christian, but who I suspect may not take his Biblical shit. Or maybe he’s mellowed.
He wasn’t a horrible human being, just a flawed mortal like all of us, and nearly thirty years later likely a much different person than he was back in 1994.
I wasn’t such a great human being back then either. As a self-impressed thirty-year-old I often surprised older people with my advanced wisdom about love and relationships but I was also antagonistic, judgemental and unnecessarily sarcastic to anyone who was ‘wrong’ about anything, meaning they disagreed with my superior and mostly-unshakeable point of view. I cringe to remember some of the things I wrote in the pages of that newspaper. When I came across my old articles a few years ago, I was horrified at how mean-spirited I was (this newspaper didn’t censor anything.) As soon as I saw one headline, Bull Paddy Religion, (a response to Bible Thumper Guy), I threw it in the trash pile. It was my vilest article. I can’t remember what I wrote but I remember it was vicious. I’m still ashamed of it.
My world isn’t as us-and-them as it was even five or six years ago. I don’t see all Trumpers as devils, after witnessing the death throes of progressive morality. Even the worst examples of humanity in the media probably aren’t horrible either. Because I know that even filthy Nazis have souls. Yes really.
Years ago I read a book a Jewish friend lent me about letters sent back home from Nazi soldiers, leaders, and bureaucrats during the war. They spoke lovingly to children who would miss them at Christmas, or hoped they might yet make it. They expressed genuine love for their wives even as they were working for one of the most loathsome murder machines.
But they genuinely loved their families. Yes, even Nazi murderers can feel love. A man who can feel love isn’t 100% monster.
We don’t like to acknowledge that. Or that there’s a little bit of monster in all of us.
Later, I read Hitler’s Willing Executioners to learn about the everyday Germans, like you and I, who partook in the Final Solution, because they’re closer to all of us than the masterminds or the ridiculously incompetent little narcissist who launched a world war. Some showed compassion to the people they murdered; one man shot Jews who fell into a pre-dug pit. A victim raised his arm and waved for attention; he then pointed to his chest. Someone took pity and finished him off rather than bury him alive.
I wouldn’t want to break bread with either executioner but it’s a reminder of what the Dalai Lama teaches: Every single human being has a Buddha nature, a part of their soul that is inherently good.
No one is impossible.
No one.
Remember Daryl Davis, the black man whose best friends are Klansmen.
It includes even the filthiest serial killers. We imprison them because we can’t fix them. Maybe future generations will, and they’ll ruminate uncharitably on how we treated these people. Science may one day show how they couldn’t help being what they were and be as appalled at our lack of compassion the way people with mental health problems were treated in asylums of yore.
George isn’t evil, and neither am I. German Nazis loved their families, as do the despicable Islamofascists agitating in cities everywhere. If one dares to look closely, one sees how toxic and damaging the left’s Critically Ridiculous Theory is and how academia is teaching and indoctrinating hatred, bigotry, and violent action to impressionable youth the way white nationalist families do.
Can we completely blame the kids for what they’ve become? I’m sixty-one; they’re forty years younger and I was a freaking idiot too when I was their age, although I certainly never advocated genocide.
Everyone has grains of decency in them. The ones we think are evil may simply not listen to us because they’re as rock-solid in their flawed beliefs as everyone else, or may suspect underneath that you have better arguments than they, and none of us likes to be proven wrong.
Or maybe they know how logically fallacious and evidence-free your arguments are, and you don’t.
So reach out to people you can’t stand, find your common ground.
Become the solution, rather than the problem. And start with a friend.
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