The twisted path that leads to no longer bothering with a friend comes from Facebook.
Thanks Facebook!
Facebook has an alert system that lets you know your friends are writing replies. Often replying to a conversation you're not involved with.
In hindsight, I foolishly clicked on that [Your Friend] has replied to...
It led to her reply to a conversation that started off talking about the election and what idiots people were who weren't liberal Democrats. But the thread led to subthreads where the participants were getting ever more specific about whom was an idiot.
The portion that set me off was how stupid, bigoted, racist, homophobic and misogynist that ALL straight white male gun owners in the south are and how much better things would be if we were all to die.
I clicked the unfriend button and stopped talking to her at that point. In April.
The wonder of it all is she didn't seem to notice that I'd stopped talking until just the other day. She sent a "hey what's up?" message in hangouts.
I tried to explain to her that she was being offensive, that I was offended and that (just maybe) she should say she was sorry.
But she doesn't understand.
She's got a right to her opinion. I should have known she didn't mean me. The people she was hating along with are actually nice people. She'd feel bad if I shit-canned a 30+ year friendship over this.
We should agree to disagree.
You will note that she doesn't refute her participation in the five minutes of hate. I chased her in circles for a long while to discover that she does really think that all white males in the south are uneducated, stupid, bigoted, racist, homophobic and misogynist breeders (except, apparently, me).
Agree to disagree?
Well, I disagree. Vehemently. If for no other reason because the crowd she's treating with wishes me dead. There's just no space to agree to disagree in here.
And this "agree to disagree" thing really pisses me off, because I can remember who I was before whom I am today.
I was sexist. I was racist. I was homophobic. What happened? I met a woman who wasn't all the things my bigoted mind said she should be. I met a black man who wasn't all the things my bigoted mind said he should be. I found out one of my best friends was gay and he wasn't all the things my bigoted mind said he should be.
I made the connection that if there is one example that breaks the stereotype, there must be others. Once that exception had been found, it broke the monolithic grouping and made them individual people.
I am disappointed in her behavior because she was one of the people who helped me see the people I was bigoted against as people.
Now I see that, like all Liberal shibboleths, that it's just fine to hate, as long as you hate correctly.
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I have had a number of similar experiences. I generally feel like I have to hide what my beliefs are unless I know I am in a forum which is actually tolerant like this one instead of one which claims to be tolerant, but actually is not... like ones typically frequented by liberals. Or ones typically frequented by certain types of usually religious conservatives (most often but not always x-tian).
ReplyDeleteWhat I've found is that a lot of hatred gets openly spewed in front of me by liberals because they assume that I am one of their fold due to me generally ignoring it. The sad thing is most of them are so indoctrinated in their bigotry and so convinced that their stereotypes of all non-liberals are true that they don't even realize how they are often making themselves the biggest hypocrites of all and doing exactly the bad things that they claim to be against.