No accounting for old friends. My friend, Steve, dating back to the early 50s, lives in California. He and Jay and I were fast friends and we all had the liberal bent. But now he is an arch Conservative. In the last several years while battling illness, his E mails are stuff forwarded without comment that he receives from a friend who lives on the West Coast too, another arch Conservative. Most of the E mails consist of YouTube items, or jokes, or fantastic photos of one sort or another but sometimes they are just mean-spirited, supposedly ironic and amusing anti-Liberal diatribes.

So I separately E mailed this friend, Brian, whose E mail address was right there to see, and asked him how my friend is doing, since I wasn’t getting any details with these forwarded E mails. And I also took him to task for his views.

Brian and I started a correspondence fraught with the traditional mindset, his of the Right and mine of Center-Left. We are never going to agree.

Meanwhile, he told Steve that we are in touch and quite surprisingly (because his illness invades the mind), I got a long, articulate if totally Right wing E mail from my old friend. Apparently Brian told him how I reminisced about us, mentioning that he was Liberal "back then". So Steve explained how totally he abandoned Liberal views because they are wrong and don't work and he can't stand the thinking he once had. So now he thinks Fox News is news. I guess there’s no going back, when we all hung out in The Village, and he and Jay played guitar and had long mathematical discussions, practically speaking in equations, and we introduced him to his wife, the exquisite Mary, my best friend, who died tragically from melanoma at the age of 30. Steve has been remarried for some years, but no longer plays guitar. He had a classical and flamenco repertoire.

Steve thinks he was a fool to ever be Liberal. How do you turn around so completely? I have a few theories. When life hands you lemons, you look for someone besides yourself and the choices you made, to blame. And sometimes, also, it's just bad luck and no one is to blame. But if feels so good to think that someone did it to you. Then you lump all negative experiences into one bag, and condemn any behavior that remotely resembles anything you have put into that bag. It saves thinking and analysis which are so hard to do and requires real effort and it also requires that you have compassion for those who differ from you.

It's also seductive to think that welfare programs for the poor are bad and are taking money out of your pocket, and it's all because they have no moral fiber, and if they were more like you, they wouldn't need help. If only they would just pull their own weight. I would like to see how much weight Sarah Palin's baby pulls when he reaches maturity. Of course, his mom has millions so for them, it won't be a problem, but for the rest, they're just too lazy and shiftless to work at getting out of their difficulties on their own.

This lack of identification with “the other”, the assumption that you are solvent because of your moral fiber and not from the fortunate circumstances that aided you along the way are factors that are too often ignored.

And too often, the demonization of good will and benevolence because, you know, charity is so expensive, merely illustrates that Right Wing minds take no responsibility for their choices, preferring to think that "if only" they hadn't been victimized they would be better off.

Too bad, too sad.

xx, Teal