The end of friendship in the time of Trump

Thinking back, it probably dwindled down to obligation years ago.

But it wasn’t clear that the college friendship I used to describe as “you know, the kind where you can not see each other for three years and you get together and it’s like you were having coffee just yesterday” had really ended until now – in the days following our 2016 presidential election.

Yeah, there were signs along the way. The gradual transition she’d made, from 1970s feminist and the first person I knew to subscribe to Ms. Magazine, to the carefully proper wife of a high-powered law firm name partner in Sacramento. The shock I’d felt when she’d admitted a few years after George W. Bush’s re-election that she’d voted for him – explaining it away by saying she’d been driven to the decision by her fear of terrorism, which he’d eagerly fed and she’d willingly bought into.

I’d remained just as political, and just as vocal, as I’d been back in college, when we both were poli sci majors at UCLA, opposed to the Vietnam War and sympathetic to liberal causes. I’d written regularly about the political activities my husband and I were involved in, whether in personal letters to her or in the annual update I’d tuck into our holiday cards. And once Facebook became a thing, I’d post regularly on the issues driving my activism.

The last time I saw her, it struck me today, was the weekend in 1999 when John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s plane went down on a flight to Martha’s Vineyard. I’d taken a Friday off from work and headed up north to see her. We spent two days in the wine country, lunching at vineyard restaurants, checking out artists’ studios and curio shops. It felt to me like just the latest visit with a lifelong friend – but as it turns out, it was the last one.

Since then, she’d responded less regularly to my letters and holiday greetings, and she hadn’t called in ages. Her Christmas cards arrived sporadically – although she sometimes would email in January or February to apologize that she’d been “so busy, the cards never got sent.” When her younger daughter came to L.A. to attend law school at UCLA in the early 2000s, I was sure we’d catch up during her visits here. But she never called. Never tried to grab coffee with me. I chalked it up to scheduling conflicts and travel times.

Long story short, my political opinions cannot have been a surprise to her. But hers sure were to me.

I was dumbfounded this spring when one of my dozens of political posts on Facebook actually elicited a response from her. It was short – and stunning. It said only, “Anyone but Hillary.”

I replied. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember saying I could understand if she was supporting Bernie, but not if she was voting for the GOP’s already anointed candidate, who had said so many offensive things – about women, minorities, immigrants, people with disabilities, the press, you name it. She couldn’t possibly be for him, could she?

She never admitted it outright – just replied that she couldn’t “vote Democrat” because she had become a “small government conservative.”

Yeah, but this election isn’t ABOUT “small vs. big government,” I replied. It’s about respect vs. hate.

She didn’t answer.

Active in Hillary’s campaign, I kept posting on Facebook. I tried occasionally to get her to engage by messaging privately. But nothing I said sparked a response. And then, two days after the election, on Veteran’s Day, she posted a photo of her dad in uniform and praised the Greatest Generation for its service.

That did it.

I replied, not privately, but publicly on her post. I said that people like my dad – a Jewish U.S. Army officer born in Russia and raised for the first five years of his life in Germany, who volunteered to serve and was sent to the German front, where he risked capture and earned the Bronze Star while helping to defeat the Nazis – would be appalled at the thought of Americans praising the troops who’d defeated Hitler’s fascism while simultaneously celebrating their success in electing America’s own 21^st Century fascist.

Her response: “Grow up and get over it.”

I ignored the condescending “grow up” slam. But get OVER it? Get over the fact that my own country has elected someone who sparks fear in Muslims and Jews, in blacks and Hispanics and Asians, in gays and the disabled, in reporters trying to do their jobs? Get over the fact that he spoke loudly and proudly about his intent to deport tens of millions of people and require Muslims to “register”? Get over the fact that one of his surrogates, who’d been a decidedly unpleasant contestant on “The Apprentice,” asserted proudly during the election that his critics would be forced to “bow down” to him when he won?

And then she called me “unhinged” for expressing those fears.

I’m sorry. It is not I who is “unhinged.” The crude, crass, ungrounded, unfocused, undisciplined, unprepared, uninformed, fame-seeking, celebrity-crazed, adulation-starved racist, sexist, misogynist, xenophobe who she helped elect to the presidency is the “unhinged” one.

As one whose religion has been “otherized” by his white supremacist campaign executive and threatened by the endorsements of David Duke and the KKK, I have every right to fear him. And to loathe her for ridiculing that fear.

I blame Donald Trump and the GOP for creating the America in which we now find ourselves. I blame them for creating the conditions in which people who once called themselves friends can no longer stomach the thought of each other.

But I blame her for her complacency and her moral and ethical blindness. I guess, when you’re safely Anglo and not a minority of any kind, when you’re fortunate enough to have married well and prospered handsomely, and you don’t have to worry about such petty details as keeping Medicare and Social Security going in your golden years, it’s easy to pooh-pooh someone else’s fear about losing it all – not just their economic security, but also their right to speak out, their religious freedom…heck their physical freedom if things were to go completely off the rails.

It must be nice not to worry about such things. But it isn’t nice not to care about those who do.