Category Archives: musing

Why it is better to write than to bang your head against the wall

Sometimes the quiet focused conversation you need to address vexations is best done on a page, between yourself and an imagined reader.  In a tense real-time conversation about things that trouble us, tempers can quickly become inflamed.  As soon as people feel defensive it becomes a tit for tat pissing contest between righteously offended parties instead of a productive conversation.   People will sometimes expect much more from you than they do from themselves.   

“You made them feel defensive!  No wonder they attacked you!” a crying loved one will conclude afterwards, when anger erupts and all attempts at peacemaking have been angrily batted away.  Your loved one will be too upset to help you much at that point and you will strain things between you by continuing to try to puzzle through it aloud.

So, a blank page.  And the opportunity to finish the thoughts angry, upset people won’t let you finish, a time to puzzle through, find and state a difficult thing clearly without static, interruption, endless challenges before you complete a sentence.   

Look, right here I can pause (with no pause showing), in a way that’s impossible to do when someone is indignant at something you are saying, will not hear it, glares and angrily points to your inability to control your emotions.

Anger happens between people when there is hurt.   In my experience, when you are upset, the best thing to do is start with a thought and a blank page.   Look how many times you can stop, read, reflect, remove a distracting word, add a sentence that clarifies what you need to express, to make your thoughts and feelings understood.  The primary benefit of this exercise, this struggle toward clarity, is for yourself, I have learned.

Others will not often be persuaded, by even the most gentle statement of something they don’t want to hear, are incapable of hearing.  It is hard to read something intended to make you question your own certainty, the rightness of your own behavior.  We live in a defensive, competitive society, a litigious culture.   In this place, if you have a problem, be prepared for a battle, even if (or especially if, perhaps) you write with the dispassionate  mildness of a sage.

“See, you’re using your talent and training, and fifty years of daily practice, to get an advantage over me because you don’t have the courage to confront me to my face!”

Be under no illusions about anyone else being influenced or moved by what you write, no matter how carefully you try to treat their injured feelings.  I had a tremendously long email correspondence with an argumentative old friend who had exploded at me several times, angrily hanging up on me the last time we spoke, after firing off a string of curses.  Some, perhaps many, would have pronounced the friendship dead at that point, but. realizing he’d been at the end of his rope, I tried to patiently lay out the tensions between us, trace what had led to his anger, point to ways we could repair our frayed friendship and become better friends to each other.   

He wrote back thanking me for my patience, and for showing him understanding instead of anger or blame, but told me he still didn’t grasp what I was actually trying to say and therefore was unable to respond to any of it.  He asked me to try to make it clear for him. I clarified each thought I’d sent him, in detail.  He thanked me for my efforts, but indicated he was still at such a loss that he was unable to respond to any point I’d raised.  Perhaps if I dropped the mildness mask, he suggested, and just honestly and directly told him why I’d been upset with him (I had, but not in a way this longtime lawyer could understand, apparently).   When I did, he was outraged and claimed to have read all of my long emails again “searching in vain for the slightest clue” about why’d I’d been so upset, though I was certainly making my anger at him clear.  Case closed.  I gave him the last word.

You may write something so clear that in the writing of it you finally understand a thing that has been too painful to confront.  The beloved child you have been carrying on your back for so long, the kid who hasn’t been responding when you talk to her, is actually dead.  The most beautiful poem ever written will not bring her back.

You deserve love

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain.  You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that.  We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

The hard part of friendship is when you are deeply hurt by a friend who then feels defensive and needs to feel understood themself about why they hurt you, tells you why you shouldn’t have been so hurt, why they couldn’t respond to you any differently, why what you needed by way of honest acknowledgment of what happened was impossible for them for a list of perfectly valid reasons — and, perhaps most importantly, how hurt they were by you saying they hurt you.  Your emotional emergency, they might explain, does not make it their emotional emergency, since they are very busy with many responsibilities and loved ones to take care of.   It can sit, until there’s time, until people are not under stress, until everyone is nice and calm.  That period of silence will give the hurt party time to heal, presumably, and then cooler heads will prevail and everything that is bothering everybody can be left in the past as the simple human mistake that it was.

The hardest part about friendship is the expectation that, no matter what, you need to take our undying love as beyond question or doubt, to understand things we can never explain, acknowledge or stop justifying.  We all have reasons for our actions and inaction, we all believe we are justified in what we do or don’t do, that we are not emotionally volatile assholes who hold in a lifetime of painful feelings and simply lash out in frustration and misplaced anger sometimes.   

“OK, fine, you want to blame us for your pain, your childish need to be the eternal victim?  Yes, we could have behaved better, we could have listened, we could have responded, we could have reached out after you reached out to us, but we didn’t, so just get over it, either accept our understandable human limitations, and our love (which you obviously don’t know how to return) or be on your miserable way.   Our life is good, and full, and fulfilling and we can’t really help you with your immense reservoir of pain, anger and need to blame others for your own problems.” 

If we are filled with infinite love, patience, wisdom and compassion we may be able to understand that position as a somewhat defensive expression of true, deep friendship, in spite of its seemingly harsh nature.  If not, we remain hurt, locked in a childish feeling of being unloved and ready to lash out even when our old friend drives hours after a day of work to prove his friendship by being there, even if unable to offer any actual comfort, to absorb a final, typical, angry outburst or two.  Push an asshole far enough emotionally, et, voila, they revert to their sickeningly aggressive, threatening, childish type.   

“Nobody wants to hear your justifications for why you felt entitled not to continue to hold your pain and frustration in, after way less than a year of simply not being heard.  It’s just sad that you need to weaponize a few months of innocent, perfectly understandable silence.  Friends don’t make you sad, friends help you.”

You will rarely get exactly what you need from another person

You can become emotionally paralyzed sometimes, holding out for exactly what you need from another person.  All color and nuance will disappear and you are left in a grim black and white, either/or zero-sum stand off where understanding becomes impossible. Character, integrity, maturity, decency and insight all become matters of heated debate. Issues reduced to enflamed morality rarely end well. Sometimes a few words intended to make all the hurtful things go away is the best you can fairly expect.   

The words may not be the ones you need to hear, they may even annoy the shit out of you with their insistence on some detail or another, but recognizing they are the best a loved one is capable of is the key to ending an emotional stalemate.  If you can’t accept that, you need to keep suffering or cauterize the wound and feel done with it.  The hardest part of accepting an imperfect apology (particularly if held out as proof that you are unforgiving) is remembering that apologizing is hard for many people in our culture. It is also rare to ever get exactly what you need in this life, no matter how clearly you ask for it, no matter how seemingly reasonable what you are asking for appears to be. 

An old friend told me it is humiliating to have to ask a loved one for something that should be given without asking.   Sometimes it is.   The sympathy and care we expect, we provide, have become mutually accustomed to, may not come sometimes.  There will always be a reason the other person is not able to extend sympathy or care, since nobody acts without a reason they believe is a good one.  It may be a good reason or a weak one.  It may be a rationale you don’t agree with, even find ridiculous.  Whatever they say to try to make things right afterwards, even if it still contains the need to defend what they did as the right thing, somehow, you must accept as the best they are capable of.

If the relationship is important to you, you can either accept the best they can do as the best they can do, and good enough, walk away or remain locked in a senseless conflict that can never end well.  In the end of intractable existential conflicts, everyone loses.  

What do you really want?

Boil it down to what you actually need to have a good life.   I suspect even the most ardent Nazi or Klansman will have a list fairly similar to mine.  For Nazism to flourish, the fact of our mortal commonality, that vast confluence of basic human/animal needs and desires, must be denied.  Denial is a powerful force in human affairs and so it is not hard to prove to a racist that all his problems are imposed on him by the Other, powerful, pathetic, inhuman monsters who are vastly inferior to him.  It’s not true, strictly speaking, but we have seen the limits of true and false in recent years, they are no barrier to any faithful belief.

What do we agree that we all need?  All of us need love and understanding.  Parents should be gentle with their children, firm when needed, and never abusive toward them.   We need friends, people we can share our lives with, the good and the bad.  Friends don’t always have to agree with us, but they always treat our feelings with care.  We need to laugh once in a while.   We need sex, and tenderness, from our partners.   We need to feel productive, however we define that.  We need food, clothing, shelter, health care, treatment of diseases that threaten us.  We need a feeling of dignity. We all want to feel safe from attacks, safe from natural disasters, the destruction of our biosphere, safe from criminals, safe from killers of various kinds.  We want to live in peace and be treated fairly by others. We want to control our own lives.  We want to live in a world where justice rules, everyone’s basic needs are met and bad people are kept away from the rest of us. 

An insane criminal court judge I used to know coined the phrase “honor anemia” to describe a root cause of the epidemic of anger, despair, shame and violence that is convulsing our society.  Most people feel they are treated as disposable by a profit-driven economic system that clearly favors only the rich and famous.  The lack of respect the other 98% of us rightfully perceive is constantly burning us, like a draining physical disease that saps our better nature.   The judge, who was greeted as “Your Honor” in all of his favorite restaurants, and who eventually convinced me that he was not just blowing smoke when he claimed he was insane, was certainly an example of the disease he diagnosed as a widespread cause of American misery.

Our better natures are challenged a hundred times a day in our corporate media-driven culture. Scroll through the headlines of your favorite newspaper and try to remember that you are a reflection of the divine.  Read one headline too many and you find yourself snarling “fuck that, these Nazi motherfuckers have to pay!”   The Nazi reader will have a similar reaction to the headine that finally sets him off “fuck that, these Jew motherfuckers have to pay!”   The impulse, of course, is identical.

We go to the dark side when our ability to keep hoping is finally crushed.   In many of us, this hopefulness is a tiny, often timorous flame, as fragile as the human soul itself.  Take away hope and you destroy the impulse to strive to be better, to dream of anything better than despair and revenge.  You wind up joining the Ku Klux Klan, and screaming in the torchlit night, with your equally enraged comrades, filled with the virile mass-murderer’s belief that at least you can go out taking some fucking inferior race mongrels with you.   A dead-end dream that leads only to death, but a dream, at least.

There are many more things that unite us than divide us.   We all need a home.   We will all die.  We all grieve and mourn the deaths of our loved ones. We all feel well-disposed toward people who treat us with kindness.  We prefer to trust people than to assume that everyone is an irredeemable piece of shit.   We all want a better world.   We would all at least flinch to see a baby toddle into traffic, or into a river, many of us would leap to save the kid before thinking about it.

The “genius” of Nazi-types is in creating specific, infuriating wedges to drive us apart.  Keep us divided, angry, afraid, insulted, ignored, ravaged by “honor anemia,” savaged daily by crushing examples of injustice, informed in a stilted status quo–confirming way by a corporate press owned by a small handful of billionaire sociopaths, and you have fertile soil for an ideology of hatred and revenge.  Then the only trick is to keep that rage focused on anyone who denies that dictatorship/oligarchy is the best form of human society.  Punish those who tell the truth under oath, criminalize dissent, incentivize partisan vigilantism and violent intimidation of hated, inhuman enemies worthy of only death.  

Me, I’m trying to keep my eye on the ball.  Someone, I think it was the Jewish sage Hillel, wrote “in a place where there are no mensches, strive to be mensch.”   Strive, my dear unknown friends, to be a fucking mensch in your life.  It is the best we can all hope for.

Emotional Maturity, anyone?

I don’t know how the artificial intelligence of YouTube algorithms determined to send me this particular video, (and I shudder to think about the sophistication of the surveillance we are all under using our smart devices) but as I watched it I said “damn!” A pretty smart little film clip with a short, powerful comparison of emotional immaturity and emotional maturity.

The narrator asks what our characteristic reaction is when someone we love hurts us. We can sulk, hoping for a magical solution. We can rage, like the cartoon of a powerful autocrat. We can grow cold and withdraw. Babies and children act this way, why shouldn’t adults?

For one thing, the world would know nothing but war and no interpersonal conflict could ever be solved.

Three characteristics of emotional maturity needed to actually solve musunderstandings and mistakes: The capacity to explain why we are hurt. The capacity to stay calm and extend the benefit of the doubt when hurt. The capacity to be vulnerable.

The narrator asks reasonably and humanely how we can expect to emerge from childhood with emotional maturity if we are raised by people lacking the emotional vocabulary, or emotional maturity, to show us how adults deal with pain? Lacking that, it’s just years of hard goddamn work not to act like a baby when we’re fucking hurt. Here’s a neat six minute primer:

Harsh truth or anodyne truth-lite?

Individuals can always spin things any way they please, since many things are strictly matters of taste and preference.   One is urged to accentuate the positive, be cheerful, not dwell on depressing or painful things!   When times are tough, look forward to a fabulous holiday, a great meal at a fantastic new restaurant, a cool new car, the pleasures a life of hard work can provide.

The same story can be told in many ways, even by readers of the same newspaper.  In one story, we are facing the worldwide march of triumphalist fascism as our habitat is being quickly boiled into a toxic miasma.  In that story, our moral obligation, if we are not fascists or those who profit from the destruction of our biosphere, is to do everything we can to avoid this awful fate for every living creature on the planet. 

The story can be told with a different emphasis: radical alarmists alarming people to advance their radical agenda.  Sure there are some bad, dishonest politicians here and there, even evil ones, sure some countries execute drug addicts, and gays, force raped girls to give birth to their rapists’ baby, commit modest genocides, sell off the rain forests that are the lungs of the planet to corporations that will bulldoze the trees to graze animals for slaughter, but there are also people doing wonderful things and life is beautiful.  Actually, it’s the radical alarmists who are alarming everybody!

The attitude behind this second version of the story is that it’s better to believe that everything is going to be fine and what we are seeing all around us its not really as bad as it looks.   I believe this myself, but not to the extent of denying we’ll have fascism shortly unless we prevent Republicans, who already have a nakedly partisan 6-3 Supreme Court (the last three chosen strictly for their extreme partisan cred) from capturing one or both houses of Congress.  In fact, unless we pick up a Manchin-proof majority in the Senate, we’re heading straight over the filibuster waterfall to the fascism of a heavily armed one party theocracy.  

Fascists don’t care about saving the environment or anything else that humanists, or humans, consider important.  Fascists care about only triumph and dominating their hated enemies.   Fascism is the harnessing of the human tic to go to war in a rage, making that lowest impulse the iron law of the land.

Calling Republican office holders and candidates fascists just because they promote what they all know is a destructive lie, in the interest of regaining absolute one-party control of everything, may seem hyperbolic to some.  Consider:  if you repeat a lie that makes people angry, and those angry people form a violent lynch mob that maims and kills people, and afterwards you defend that lynch mob’s right to try to kill people they believe betrayed them, and you are required not to break the party-line wall defending the lie and the mob, and you vote in a bloc to hurt your political opponents, who you vilify, and leave every problem to get worse so that you profit politically, is there a more accurate word than “fascist” to describe you?

Mel Brooks has a genius definition of comedy and tragedy that rings so true it hurts.   “Tragedy is when I break a fingernail.  Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.”   A slapstick sight gag vs. actual personal suffering, no matter how minor.

How you view and tell the story is determined by your personal experience and your emotional needs.   Humans can always find an anodyne truth-lite way of spinning stories that would otherwise terrify them.  Just ACC-cen-tuate the positive!

The positive, to me, is truth, honesty.  If you are talking about what really happened, as opposed to what you want to believe happened, we can discuss anything you like.  Nothing is out of bounds, nothing can’t be solved, if we agree on the facts of what we are talking about.  If you insist on an anodyne version that lets culpable parties off the hook, that makes you feel better — at the expense of reality — that’s your wonderful belief and God bless.   Just don’t try to insist on that bullshit to someone like me.

Isolation can kill

Isolation, like many things, can be good or bad.   On the good side, you have the uninterrupted time to be introspective, to ponder things that may perplex you and the quiet to work out difficult life puzzles.  On the bad side, extended isolation can drive a person mad because when there is nothing but yourself to distract you from your troubles your mind starts to cannibalize itself.   

The UN declared the isolation of solitary confinement, for more than 15 days, to be torture.  Our history and traditions support the practice of solitary confinement, an estimated 80,000 US prisoners are held in solitary confinement under a variety of rationales as I type these words.  Here’s a bit on the deeply rooted history and traditions piece that the most authoritarian on our doctrinaire 6-3 Supreme Court like so much:

The practice of completely isolating prisoners began in Pennsylvania and New York, and goes back to a theory proposed in the early 19th century, said Peter Scharff Smith, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights.

Quakers in Philadelphia proposed that if prisoners were kept in complete isolation, they might find redemption and rehabilitation by concentrating on their weaknesses without distraction and ultimately become closer to God. Taking up the theory, Pennsylvania built a wheel-shaped prison in Philadelphia designed to ensure that every prisoner was completely alone.

One famous visitor to this prison, called the Eastern State Penitentiary, was Charles Dickens. In 1842, he wrote in “American Notes” that life in the prison was “rigid, strict, and hopeless.” The prison is still standing but has not been used since 1971.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/solitary-confinement-form-torture

I suspect this early 19th century reasoning is good enough for the Federalist Society Six, should the issue of solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment (maybe cruel, but certainly not unusual, Kavanah, J.) come before the court so deeply rooted in our history and traditions, and why not?   First liberals complain about conservatives taking away the so-called right to privacy, and then, when the state provides absolute privacy, Social Justice Warriors whine about that too!  

Solitary confinement is one thing, and an extreme and terrible form of isolation, but social isolation is a kind of torture too.  In the old days (and probably to this day), religious communities would excommunicate people they deemed assholes, send them out of the community and into nature where they could fend for themselves or die, or both.  

We live in a time of extreme social isolation for many millions of us.  In this isolation we are constantly goaded by the relentless, stupid war over everything.  This war mentality has been greatly exacerbated by the lockdown and the idiotic zero sum war of principle, waged by mask and vaccine skeptics, over how to best combat a deadly pandemic.  Guys like the inimitable Charles Koch have spent hundreds of tax-free millions to make sure we live in a black and white world of existential conflict to the death, with no solutions available to any but the few who benefit from the mayhem.  The more armed hate groups, the better, for untouchable guys like Koch. 

The natural response to this determined, public, endlessly repeated stonewalling of every possible solution is widespread disaffection, despair and anger which bursts into rage pretty easily.  This rage, which has nowhere else to go, is turned on each other, and on ourselves.   We live in a time of mounting American deaths of despair, by drug overdoses, by guns, by just going out and shooting random people until the cops come, and if you are Black, you are instantly a successful suicide by cop.

In a time of unprecedented social isolation, a handful of genius American entrepreneurs have monetized American loneliness by creating a virtual world of unlimited like-minded friends.  Online we can even have followers, just like actual celebrities.  Even this little-read, unknown blahg has over 300 followers.  Would they march with me to the gates of Hell?  Not one, I’d wager, but, shit, I have a small army of noncommittal followers, which nobody can deny.

Instead of communities, and a small group of people we can count on in times of trouble, we have the illusion of a gigantic community of people who think and feel just like we do.   They share the same political views, the same moral stances, the same shopping habits, the same tastes in food, drink and culture.  We may never see them in real life, but isn’t it nice to know we are not alone?  I mean, if it wasn’t for the mass illusion that we are part of a vast network of like-minded friends and followers, many more of us would probably be suicidal at this point in the long, ugly, ceaseless war of each against all that has been forced on us by our most powerful citizens.   Maybe the mass illusion itself is a cause of despair, we know that these “friends” are not real and we think back sadly to when we had real friends we could be honest with, who could console us, personally, having been in our actual, offline lives for years.   

Trust?  Despair? Benefit of the doubt? Silence?  Abstractions, like death, that we are free to endlessly contemplate or run from, in our chafing isolation.  Thankfully, we all have each other.

insight?

When I was in my late twenties, visiting the farm of my parents’ best friemd, Arlene, she laid a great truth on me. As we watched the sun set one evening she said:

“You feel like you disappointed your parents, like you’re responsible for their unhappiness. I love your parents to death, as you know, they’re my best friends, but they are both very unhappy people. They just are, they were that way long before you were born. Their unhappiness has nothing to do with you, there is nothing you can do to change it, the burden of it is not something you need to carry through life.”

Though what she said sounds obvious to me now, it was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on a light in the universe.

That understanding was an immense help to me, comparable to my father’s older first cousin Eli, years later, describing how he witnessed his beloved Aunt Chava grab the thick, burlap covered cord for her steam iron, from a drawer behind her seat at the kitchen table, and whip little Irv across the face with it.

“In the face?” I said.

“Yep, over and over,” said Eli.

“Jesus,” I said, “how old was he?”

“However old you are when you can stand on your two feet without falling over,” he said, with limitless sorrow. He saw it many times after that, and he said that over time all she had to do was rattle the drawer where she kept the whipping cord and young Irv would stand at rigid attention, staring at the ground, trembling, waiting for the whipping to start.

how writing helps you clarify things

I was raised by parents who had been physically and psychologically abused as children.  They grew to adulthood with little ability to restrain themselves when frustrated and, quick to anger, took out their unbearable feelings on their children.   My sister and I were blamed for all kinds of things, some of them ridiculous.  I trace my need to express myself to my childhood desperation to untie the knot of the incoherent story I was expected to accept about myself, about my sister.   I started writing fairly young, and before that I drew, constantly.   

“Why are your drawings so scary?” my mother would sometimes ask.   

“Because I can’t write yet,” I might have told her.

I had a girlfriend and her baby visit me in New York decades ago, saved up, sent them plane tickets.  The child, who I loved very much, is now in her thirties, maybe forty (damn!).   I last saw her on her fourth or fifth birthday.   Her mother was beautiful, talented, had a great sense of humor, we got along great, I loved her, but in the end things didn’t work out between us.  During the week they were my guests, the two year-old had a few temper tantrums, as two year-olds do, and her mother tried to press me into moving to California and join the community she lived in with her Indian guru, Baba Hari Dass.  I felt increasingly pressured as the week went on.

After they left I found a drawing I’d done while they were in NY.   It was a shapely woman’s leg, standing firmly on its lovely foot, with a leash tied to the thigh, where a garter would be.   The leash was taut and straining against it was a dog with a human face, and a huge boulder on his back.

“Fuck,” I thought when I saw that drawing afterwards, “that self-portrait says it all…”

I find this unexpected revelation of my deeper feelings with writing sometimes.  I read something I wrote and a phrase jumps out to clarify a complicated quandary for me.  Here’s a paragraph I wrote recently that made me realize something very important about a prolonged estrangement from two of my oldest, dearest friends.

Long, deep talk with old friends recently [different ones — ed.], reminding me of the healing power of being heard and of forcing yourself to hear things you may not like to hear.  These are crucial perspectives you can’t come to on your own when you are impaired by pain. Good friends don’t always have to agree with you, though they often do, but they always treat you with care when you need care. 

Simple test: did my oldest friends always treat me with care when I needed care?

Well, not always, and lately, for the last nine months or so, no care at all.  In fact, the opposite of care. They insisted I was wrong to feel the way I did after one jumped ugly with me, since in their story she was only reacting to my threatening attitude.  They blamed me for ruining a wonderful vacation with a flash of anger the last day, denied there was any tension at all leading up to my outburst, just a simple misunderstanding I blew up over, until seven months later one of them admitted things had been very tense, because she had been micromanaging everything to make sure it was all perfect.  The other one later threatened me that he’d walked away from friendships for less than what I’d done to him.  The first one had a temper tantrum, then was so shocked later that I still needed to talk about it that she went incommunicado for months, then had another temper tantrum when I dared to bring up the troubling pass our long relationship has come to.  

Understanding does not lead to a clean solution to your vexations, but it is better to see the thing clearly than to have it muddily painful in your head, waking you hours too early, like a toothache.  I compare this depressing impasse with my dear, old friends to having a knife stuck in my side by one of them, unintentionally, let’s say.  When I pointed to it, the other pushed it in a little further.   Months later, when I gestured toward the still unhealed knife wound, the first one stuck her finger deep into it and wiggled it around.  I didn’t bleed out, I didn’t lose consciousness, so what am I fucking blubbering about?  That’s a tiny flesh wound, asshole, I’ll give you something to blubber about!

To forgive is divine, truly, and to be slow to anger is praiseworthy.  I managed not to respond to either of them with anger, but their conditional apologies turn out to be hollow, empty, without form or substance, without any change in behavior.   I don’t need apologies anyway, as I explained to them, I need to be heard and understood by loved ones when I’m hurt. You know, empathy, understanding, the benefit of the doubt — basic friendship.  I expect to be treated with the same care I extend to them.  But that turns out to be unreasonable when the only pain the other person can truly relate to is their own.

We are all capable of casting ourselves as the victims when things get ugly, and things are ugly enough for all of us right now on this imperiled little planet, at the doorstep of climate destruction and surging worldwide fascism.  There are also not always two equally compelling sides to every story.  Treating friends with care is the most basic duty of friendship.  Dereliction of that duty, especially if repeated over and over, is an indication that the friendship you are clinging to may already be dead.   

I still have a hope that these two dear friends will have an unexpected change of heart the next time we meet, whenever that might be.   I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised, delighted and relieved, by that change of heart, that deeper understanding.  It’s a slim, wan, simpering hope, I know, but it is a hope and I appreciate it.  Hope is always better than no hope, I believe, until the proof is irrefutable and the hope for something better is crushed by dull, heavy, merciless reality.