But my question was, “Why should I be friends with such a person?”
I want to respect my friends. I want to like my friends. How can I like and respect someone who is hateful and pathologically mentally lazy?
It’s not like the 30% or so of delusional, far-right-wing Americans have some organic mental illness that came on them beyond their control. Humans are not automata — we can make choices. They chose a world view that allows them to believe anything they want to believe. They have been driven for a generation now entirely by hate. If they ever cared to question, they could find out the truth of their ridiculous cartoon beliefs in seconds on the Internet. Their evil is their responsibility — they cannot brush it off with the excuse of mental illness, it’s a mortal insult to the tens of million Americans who suffer from actual debilitating mental illness (and I might add are woefully under- or mistreated).
Look at the decade of delusional hatred they have vented on Obama!
In fact, Obama was a President whose economic policies were in practice not substantially different from Ronald Reagan’s, except that Reagan’s Justice Department gave Wall Street criminals hard time even for small procedural issues that didn’t significant damage anyone, while Obama let the architects of the global financial crisis, a global catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands, off with a slap on the wrist.
But it was made completely clear to us that this decade of hate is nothing to do with Obama’s policies but his skin color.
When a friend tells you, “The first time my wife saw Obama on TV, she knew in her heart he was a sick, broken man” — this from a Trump supporter — am I supposed to smile and take it? I mean, I personally deplore Obama’s politics and yet this still enraged me! (And I also laughed internally, and I didn’t say much past, “And what did she think when she first saw George W. Bush?” and he just looked at me puzzledly. But this was 2016, before the election.)
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About 30% of Americans have chosen to believe exactly what they want to believe, not what is actually true — and this is a pack of hateful lies that are contributing to the destruction of America and the world’s environment — just when we need action on it the most. Any feeling, compassionate person should be feeling tremendous rage right about now for the future that is being robbed from our children by bloviating delusional psychopaths.
These people aren’t my friends — by their words, their actions, and their very lives, they’re my enemies! I honestly expect there will be a shooting war before it’s all said and done because I have been told this over and over again by these same enemies — and they have all the guns. I just hope it will fizzle out and act as an inoculation against further madness.
