LIAD

[fancycwabs]

Dear friend,

It's okay to be a Republican. Even a conservative, if you think you can justify it through rational means. But the endless string of Coulter-esque trolling on facebook and outright hateful language towards the people who call you a friend make me question your moral compass. When your politics comes at the expense of your ability to understand and sympathize with your fellow man, even if you disagree with them, perhaps it's time to reconsider your politics.

I apologize if the forthcoming "unfriending" is going to hurt your feelings. Doubtless it will add to your persecution complex. Unfortunately, we're judged by the company we keep, and life's too short to deal with angry bigots.

I'll be there if you ever actually need help. I always have been.

Randy.

Comments

[loree-borealis.livejournal.com]

Sad.
I have a few "friends" like that. Fortunately they aren't terribly vocal, until once in awhile they say something so astounding to me that I wonder that we can be friends at all.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

Alas, this particular friend can't post a status update without it accusing liberals of treason. In person he keeps his obnoxious politics to himself, but I almost never see him in person.

[hemlock-martini.livejournal.com]

Was it always this bad between left and right? It may be nostalgia to imagine that there was basic civility in politics "back in the day," but on the other hand, there's so much vitriol coming from the right now. It's all they have left.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

I think the omnipresence and fragmentation of the media has probably had a negative effect on political discourse, by and large. When I was a kid and there were but three channels on the television, there was no room for a Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, or Bill O'Reilly.

Anyone coming up with the hard-right opinions espoused by the media blowhards would have had to invent them all by themselves, and as far as I know lack the capacity for evil to do so independently.

[babs-the-nymph.livejournal.com]

I lost a friend after the election because of this. The email sent to me the day after was just so repugnantly awful that I told him that was it. He then emailed me a week later asking "What? What did I do?" I think that the extreme far right screechy rhetoric is attractive to people who may have been unhinged to begin with.

[fancycwabs.livejournal.com]

There's something about the FOX news machine that makes folks think that if enough blowhards on television are saying things, it must be right or normal. I can shrug off Ann Coulter saying that I'm an idiot traitor for wanting equal access to health care, but when friends, people who have helped me out--and vice-versa--spout racist rhetoric and repeat the lies they hear on talk radio, it makes me wonder what happened to them.

n.b. The particular "friend" this was addressed to told me that he never quite understood why my ex-wife (whom he was keen on sleeping with) and I had gotten married, because we were "so different." Clearly so, as I am a liberalish man, and she was a dirty lesbian adulteress.