I Don't Want To Write This.....

....and  I didn't want to un-friend him, but it finally became untenable to have him in my space. 

We disagreed on everything political and social, but he loved his wife and she loved him, and he was very kind to me whenever we met, and whenever we met it was fraught with so many other pieces that I was only looking for the comfort and solace and not staring too hard at what was inside.

And I really want to believe that there is a good person in there, the person I thought I saw when I looked at him, when he hugged me. I dismissed other people's avoidance of him; I didn't see it and they were over-reacting and was that really enough to run the other way.

Well, I'm apologizing to them all, right here and right now.  I guess it just hadn't hit my own particular button. 

That all changed last week.  It's taken me his long to get to the keyboard and type; I was running from the intensity of the feelings.  Fury.  Amazement.  Surprise.  Shock. Disappointment (the biggest of the feelings and the one that keeps coming back to smack me in the I'm-going-to-cry space) (pause for a tissue run).

It's not that we were best friends.  Not at all.  We interacted on social media, we ran into one another at events.  I won't miss him in my everyday life...... except that I will. 

I've tried to keep the lines of communication open to input from The Other Side.  I cannot abide Fox News (except Chris Wallace).  I didn't talk politics with the ladies at mah jongg whose views were on the other side, because I loved the game and didn't want to soil it with their idiocy.  But knowing how They think, what they are hearing, what they are ignoring has seemed worth the Oh, dear, REALLY!?!

Up until last week, that is. 

The fact that I knew nothing about Newsmax is a measure of the fracturing of our society.  Searching the interwebs told me that they get more views than the Huffington Post. It's a right-wing or Conservative or conservative or Republican multi-platform news outlet, and it's what pushed me over the edge.

We were in a mini-controversy about wearing masks.  He posted an article defending his position, but I don't know what it said.  I was distracted by the headline just above his article: Famous Jew Says

The rest was cut off by an ad.  But I'd seen enough.

Now, if you can't or don't want to click through to Facebook for that link, you'll be hard pressed to find any "print" coverage of this on the interwebs.  This is the link to the article Mr. Google gave me; it's a dead end, with nothing to show for itself.  It's lost in the ether.

But the Famous Jew is David Horowitz, about whom I know nothing except that he is the author of Dark Agenda: The War To Destroy Christian America.   His thesis in the Newsmax piece (that lockdown orders prohibiting church attendance are ......) is his opinion and he's entitled to it and I can ignore it if I want. 

It's his billing that offends me.

Famous Jew.

It rang all my bells.  It's a trope that sends chills up and down my spine.  That my former friend wasn't appalled showed me a hole in his experience that, by his 70th year or se he should have been able to fill in.

He blew me off when I pointed this out, calling me out for automatically discounting anything that's not on CNN. 

But CNN isn't posting Famous Jew headlines.  And my former friend is not posting anything anywhere that I am likely to see it ever again. 

I'm sure he doesn't get it.  At this point, I have no further interest in trying to explain it to him.