Dear X:
You and I had a sweet friendship: we raised children and discussed husbands together; we traded perennials and casseroles in times of need; we visited one another in funeral homes, hospitals and churches; we met one another’s families; we babysat and cleaned and laughed and cried together. I was the reason you homeschooled; you were the reason my dad got proper health assistance when he needed it.
You unfriended me. When you unfriended me from Facebook, I cared not. But you also unfriended me from your life. That hurt deeply and it still does. Even though I never supported him until it came time to vote, you unfriended me because I spoke in Donald Trump’s defense one too many times―while you campaigned relentlessly for HRC and insisted she was the hope of the future. That was it, nothing more. We never even exchanged volleys of words or ideas, until it was time for you to tell me why I was gone.
Why am I writing this so many months after the event itself? I will not even send this to you. You will probably never see it. But I feel it necessary to put the words on paper in light of yesterday’s shooting at the baseball field.
You say you support the Democratic Party. You support their ideals and politics. You are a respected woman in the community—a woman with elite degrees that few attain, a wife of a successful man. And yet you support a party of fools. The party you support is associated with pink vagina hats; congressmen flipping the bird toward our president while leading chants of “F*** Trump!”; women demonstrating nakedto make some sort of mysterious point; lies spewed constantly and regurgitated ad nauseum; a candidate who lied and cheated and stole and violated the laws of our hallowed land; a comedienne holding a faux severed, bloody head of our sitting president; and, today, a marksman searching out members of the opposite party and successfully gaining purchase. Your party instigates hatred and violence and judgment.
What does this have to do with you, you ask? You would never do any of those things, so why am I so angry and tying these malevolent acts to you? Because you, my old friend, are one and the same. It all begins personally, it all begins at home.
If you cannot even abide a difference with an old, loved friend, you are fomenting the very intolerance that your party seethes over. You are raising children to be as short-sighted and critical as you, who will not be able to think critically to discover the truth for themselves. You are insulating yourself from differences that might expand your worldview, preferring instead your insular existence built on half-truths.
That is the reason for this letter. Truth must reside within us, as must respect for our fellow man. Without those, we are lost, and lost forever. It is only when we can shake hands across the proverbial aisle with open eyes and a care for one another that supersedes differences that true change can be evinced.
May God bless us all
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