“The first rule about Fight Club is never talk about Fight Club.” – A line from the movie Fight Club
This week I read an editorial in Townbroadcast by its editor, Dave Young, that made me ponder the casualties of the MAGA/Cult of Trump era.
Mr. Young wrote about the friendships he had lost over the past ten years due to the clash of values, or, more specifically, what happened when his moral center came up against the lack of morals among those who have become disciples of Donald Trump.
It’s very hard to maintain a friendship with someone whose values are as polar opposite as the MAGA crowd and the traditional (that is to say not the Christian Nationalist right) Judeo-Christian crowd. And while I acknowledge that there are many shades of grey between a rabid MAGA disciple and a Mother Theresa, it is fair to say (and Dave can correct me if I am wrong) that there is a heavy undercurrent of anti-Semitism/racism/misogyny and ant-LGBTQ+ sentiment on the political right.
Mr. Young has found that he cannot maintain a friendship with someone whose moral center is so out of balance with his own. And I admire his ability to cut off those people with whom he can no longer find common ground.
I have found myself in similar predicaments where it applies to two of my very close friends.
One of them is a man named Eric who I volunteer with on Tuesdays at the Chandler (AZ) Public Library. Eric is a really nice man. He used to be a surveyor for Maricopa County (AZ) when it was still mostly open range land and agricultural fields. He has great stories about the characters and situations he has encountered over the years as he has set or corrected property lines for the county government and the residents.
We have lots of interesting and spirited conversations about such things as guns and gun control. I’m not a big fan of guns, maybe because of what I know they can do and because I’ve learned how to shoot rifles and handguns and know what they can do.
Eric, on the other hand, is a fan, and he carries a concealed weapon to church on designated Sundays in much the same way that I used to serve as usher or lay leader in church. It makes for great conversation, but never in any way that makes it impossible to be friends.
Eric is a Trump supporter. Not the red cap wearing type, but enough of one that there are some points on which we will never agree where Trump is concerned.
Still, we really like each other. So we have adopted an unspoken rule. We never talk about things MAGA/Trump.
It’s the only way we can remain friends.
The second predicament involves my relationship with my outlaw Nancy. You might recall me writing about her. She is my second son’s mother-in-law. (We call each other “outlaw,” which is a term coined by my Pop to describe the relationship between the parents of married people for which there is no word.)
Nancy is a born and bred Arizona Republican. As far as I know, she has never voted for a candidate of any other party. I, on the other hand, though born to east coast Republicans, have traversed the spectrum from Republican to Independent to Democrat. And I’ve landed hard on the liberal end of that spectrum.
But Nancy and I share so much in common. There is, of course, our kids, and then the grandkids. We have sat together at countless little league baseball games, complaining to each other about the bad calls by the umpires!
We have both been librarians. We trade books back and forth as we discover and share the authors we find.
We sit together at Thanksgiving, enjoying how great it is to have reached the age where we can let everyone else do the cooking and cleaning up. There is so much laughter between us that I smile just thinking about it.
However, underneath it all lies the truth that when it comes to Trump we have different feelings that could erupt into something ugly if we didn’t just tamp it down, or, as we do, observe the rule of “Don’t Talk About Trump.”
So after reading Mr. Young’s column about the friendships he has lost over ten years of Trump’s influence, I feel like I’m looking at two sides of this cultural coin.
Who has lost more? Is it Dave, who no longer has his relationships with people whose morals are no longer in alignment with his own? Or is it me, who has had to abandon part of my moral self in order to keep these two friends whom I hold so dear?
