This one’s hard, committed to cutting the cord on one of my oldest friends. Known him for 20+ years, but the right-wing nonsense tip he’s been on for some time now is giving me complete anxiety over even the thought of basic interactions with the guy.
We both grew up in a small rural community that he’s stayed in while I moved away. My ma and a large chunk of my family are still there so we’ve always been able to maintain close contact despite the distances. He’s a dude I’ve always really connected with, one of those situations where there’s no front, and you can just be yourself. The opportunities for such a relationships become so infinitely smaller as you get older - you can’t be a weird dork around any old 30 year olds you just meet. Like any friend you’ve had for decades it’s like you have your own language. Silences aren’t awkward. No passive aggressive competition like most adult ‘friends.’
He’s a white dude, my family is big and multiracial, and even as a kid he was prone to the usual bigoted crap that small town people spew. I understood it then as a product of his dyed-in-the-wool racist family… hell there were members of my own family that cut us off for marrying Indigenous and Latino folks, having mix raced babies, etc. But I had the privilege of having older brothers and uncles living in big cities to educate my ignorant ass as a kid. He didn’t. I felt a duty to pass this learning onto this friend, sometimes it worked, more times it didn’t. I never truly believed the guy had hate in his heart, and I felt - probably naively, and definitely self-absorbedly - I could keep him tethered to some semblance of humanity. It’s one of those situations I’m sure a lot of people who grew up in backwards places experience - a person who’s tolerable and kind 99% of the time, but then this 1% of evil shit that can be unleashed by seemingly nothing. There’ve been instances in the past that brought me to the brink, incidents that would definitely have caused more courageous people than myself to say “enough’s enough, get fucked bud” (ICYDK, Canadian). But, whether though cowardice of losing a part of your past, or the misguided idea that no one is beyond redemption, I trundle on with this motherfucker. I have a heart-to-heart, he shows some change, “oh look, he’s willing to admit that white privilege is a thing!” only to be followed by him saying some weird racist shit in front of my girl (also not white), who rightly declares “we’re not stopping by for ‘visits’ anymore.”
All this accelerated in the last few years, and even then I wanted to defer to “hey, everyone’s going through shit rn, have patience.” But his machine gun rapidity of conspiracy theorist podcasts, the anti-science, the anti-intellectualism, the sudden caring about “government overreach,” the disparaging of anyone talking about racial inequality, the total fragility of the male displays of whatever the fuck that freedom convoy thing is, the subtle cop endorsement - fucking all of it - too much. I have no faith in my ability to turn this around anymore.. I’m not a therapist, and definitely not a cult deprogrammer. It feels like a project I’ve been working on for 20 years is coming to absolute nothing, just a malignant unfinished failure. Which I know is a fucked and selfish way to frame a friendship, but the anger/sadness is blinding me to any enlightenment on the whole ugly thing.
Anyway, thanks for listening SLAP. That was way too long.
Topic: Things You Are Not Stoked On (Read 1886248 times)