The View from a Drawbridge

I have three friends whom I have always known to be wonderfully kind and caring individuals. But in recent years they have saddened me by posting some extreme right, misogynistic, racist, conspiracy theorist, anti-science, and/or anti-compassion posts on Facebook. It was heartbreaking because I didn’t know this kind of hate and ignorance was within them. It caused me to distance myself. No, I haven’t written them off entirely, but I haven’t gone out of the way to seek them out, either. (But then, as an autistic person, I’ve always found myself on the periphery of every relationship, anyway.)

But today, I went and visited their Facebook pages, just to see what they were saying these days. Were they gloating? Because this world we are in now is, surely, what they were hoping for, right? I mean, it was what they were encouraging, supporting, and voting for, so what are they saying now?

All three of them (and, by the way, they do not know one another) have gone politically silent. Their posts have become rather generic and innocuous and they don’t really reveal anything at all. One has taken to posting nothing but religious scripture, and none of the passages seem to even be old testament in nature. Another one has headed down the path of nature images with no added commentary. The third went so far as to delete all his former hate, and has added a fresh layer of children’s cartoons, which seems kind of harmless yet strange, and then has gone uncharacteristically silent for the past 3 weeks.

I don’t know what any of that means, other than the fact that they now seem to be aware of the strange land in which we all now dwell. Who knows if they realize that they are complicit in putting us here. Who knows if they feel as vulnerable, or if they still think they have some extra added protection. But they’ve altered their façade, at least, so one has to wonder what is going on internally.

Maybe they’ve doubled down on their ideology and don’t feel the need to proselytize anymore, because they still are under the mistaken belief that they’ve “won”. Maybe they’re in shock because the demon they unleashed has spun around and is now coming for them, too, so they aren’t feeling quite as in control as they thought they would. Maybe they’ve come to their senses and are ashamed of their participation in the build-up to this madness.

Their situation was always precarious, because the Republican party relies on the poor for the votes, and the rich for the money. Somehow, they’ve perfected the art of convincing the poor that their interests align with the rich. But once the poor vote for them and they get into power, they then have to please their rich financiers by cutting taxes, and the best way to do so is by going after the low hanging fruit, such as medicaid, which ultimately crushes the poor. The poor are now starting to be crushed in ways so extreme that even they are struggling to ignore them. It will be interesting to see how their perspectives now change. If they do, here’s hoping their memories are a little bit longer this time. They may have a constant reminder, because this damage will take decades to repair.

I don’t know what has prompted the changes in their Facebook pages. I will probably never know. It’s not my place to shake confessions out of these people. No matter how things play out, I’m very disappointed that I’ll never be able to look at them with the pure admiration that I had for them in the past. There’s a lot of emotional scar tissue on the body politic. These dear friends chose to taint their own images, and they will never be as untarnished as they used to be.

But I do like that there’s, at least, some sort of metamorphosis going on. Who knows what they’re turning into. Perhaps we’re all turning into things that we’ve never before seen. I don’t want to tempt fate by saying that whatever it is, it couldn’t possibly be worse that what they’ve been for the past couple years. I can only hope that we’ll all emerge from this having become much wiser and kinder.

These days, even a glimmer of hope feels like a feast. Change is afoot, and with change comes possibilities. I’ll take it.