On Disposable Friends

5 November 2022: Elections are again upon us, hence it is time (again) to check our six as far as our friendships go.

At some point after 9/11 in the early New York winter of 2001, it became clear to me that I needed to conduct a searching inventory of my soul and rebuild, almost from the ground up, my sense of who I was and how I thought about the world I was in and the life I was leading. At the time, I knew only that I had been mistaken about a great many things in the world and American culture for a very long time. I was long overdue for an extreme makeover of the self.

To do that I used the only set of skills I was ever any good at, reading and writing.  With these flimsy tools, I began -- in fits and starts at first  -- changing into someone different from the person I had been. This is nothing either unusual or dramatic. The reinvention of the self is the SOAP (Standard Operating American Procedure) that scrubs out souls. It seemed to me at the time, and it still seems to me today, that I had no choice but to begin and continue with my slapdash self-renovation until such time that it seems to me to be finished.

All of this is a worn-out way of saying that it has become my discipline to try and write my way to a new kind of freedom I still only vaguely see. This is neither unusual nor dramatic. Many other Americans do it. Many more use other tools to accomplish a similar goal; career change, relocation, materialism, spiritualism, conversion, drugs, alcohol, rehabilitation, and Jesus. As Americans, our options for reinvention are numerous with more being minted daily.

We are a restless people in America, a yondering race that seldom finds the here and now good for more than a few years in any one place -- in our hearts or on the land. We meet, make close warm friends, and then we part, promising to see each other 'down the road a piece. Often we do, but much more often we do not.

And as we move across the land and through our lives, so we move within our hearts and souls, in our persuasions, and in our politics. In so doing, we often come to the belief that people we once thought of as significant,  irreplaceable, are, indeed, disposable in the pursuit of our own personal goals.

Disposable people are just another product of our disposable culture. And the stark truth of this matter is that disposable people are the case much more often than it is not.

We like to say that there is one special person on the earth for each of us, but the truth is that there are probably 10,000 special people on earth for each one of us. It's not romantic to say so, but with more than five billion people on the planet, the odds loom large against such romanticism. Instead, we come to the realization that there are lots of people hanging about that will do and, in the words of Ulysses' Molly Bloom, "Well, as well you as another."

But what is desirable disposability to the individual American can become disastrous to American society.

It is commonplace in our disposable culture to contend that a divorce between two people is a solution to the recurring problem of incompatibility; of marital bed-death. And this often is true for the two individuals involved. The deeper problem is that when millions upon millions of couples avail themselves of this personal "no-fault" solution, it becomes a disaster to society. It becomes normality. Divorce, especially the risibly named “no-fault divorce” underscores the disposability of couples and the family and demonstrates it to all, old and young.

Thus the whole cycle begins anew, growing ever larger than before until it displaces a society built on faith and trust with one founded on little more than the thin gruel of fast food and fast things. We become a preening people with the desire to be admired through possessions and posturing rather than works and deeds. Our crippled souls become smaller then. We have only so much room in them and to bring others in, some must be disposed of. "As well you as another" becomes "Next!"

Once this disposability is realized inside the self, it is only a small step to the kind of culture that compulsively puts material things above people as the real goals in life. After all, you will have lots of people in your life, but only one life -- so you'd best grab what you can on the material plain while you can. "You take what you need and you leave the rest."

One of the crucial questions of our blighted age is whether or not we are correct in regarding human life as something which is, under the proper conditions and self-ascribed definitions, something that really is "disposable" whenever it becomes inconvenient. And in our answer to this, we drop into the “No Fault” bucket not only automobile accidents but divorce, abortion, and euthanasia. This is how we pretend to live now, but it is just life made the slave of death.

I quit being a Democrat at some point in the months right after September 11. Since that time I've lost old and, I thought, true friends who have assumed, wrongly and in spite of my objections, that I had become "a Republican."

Trapped or self-banished into a bipolar political mind, these thin shadows of previously sentient souls assume all others around them share this binary, black-and-white realm as they argue for the grey zones they learned about so deeply in their youth. Drowned in the vats of political poison, they bob mindless in a vat of current political correctness. Should you appear suddenly as "not one of us" you have become the other; dismissable lest you trouble their sleep, disposable lest you clutter their lives. In a click, unfriended.

I have no wish to "become a Republican," nor do I have the slightest idea of how to be one. But it seems to be the default assumption of many that the measure of a man and the worth of a friendship has become entirely based on how one did or did not vote in November of 2016 or 2020. It is amazing to me that such a simplistic reduction can be made. And yet it is. And because so many believe the dark thoughts of their Democrat colonized minds, millions of friendships that might have enlarged lives rendered, like so many other things, disposable.

As Gary Snyder wrote, “Aristotle’s in the crapper. They’re up to the part on ethics now.”

I know that friendship is a fragile accord between two people, subject to an instant's revision, review, and revocation. We all know that and accept it. I also know that, in life, we outgrow many people and they outgrow us; often those we have thought of as our best friends. Our least disposable relationship is with our children, our family second, lovers third, and friends -- frankly-- a distant fourth. Yet who would say life is worthwhile without them?

It has always seemed strange to me that there are people who, having lived in and battened on our democracy, and who spend a great deal of time averring that they have no prejudice and are for fair-mindedness, equity and equality, now determine their personal lives and relationships around the thin measure of party affiliation. I've never done that myself, but I understand now that there are many who do. It has been demonstrated to me recently and it will, I have no doubt, be demonstrated again in the future, as friends come and go during this turbulent era.

There is a fire in the minds of men now much as there was at the beginning of the 20th-century cycle of genocidal revolutions. Like some surreal and slow-burning civil war the flames in this continuing conflagration pit brother against brother and friend against friend. And so they go, as the other things of life that were once good and have now turned bad, away along a path of life that you no longer can share.

In the last decade and a half, some friends stormed out of my life in a rage and others just dumped me like a teenager dumps last week's flame. Others still have intentionally faded away. I am not innocent of this. I've done it as well. Some of them I miss, but others I do not. I'm sure those once and faded friends feel the same way. But why?

I think it is because these last few years, for those of us who think seriously about being alive in the world, have served up serious issues that require serious conclusions, and that to refuse to face these issues, even if they cost you friends, is a betrayal of life.

"I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live. -- Deuteronomy

I've learned if I've learned anything, that the casual catchphrase "Well, it's not worth losing a friend over" has very real limits. And those limits do not involve whether or not one is a Democrat or a Republican, but whether or not one is ready to choose good over evil and life over death. In the end, it's not political, it's personal.

An old aphorism states, "Life is a series of lessons. Each lesson will be repeated until you learn it. At that point, you will be given a new lesson."

There's humor in that both dark and deep. I've had my share of lessons that are very hard to learn, lessons that I find I have failed at again and again. There have been lessons I learned wrongly, lives and people I have let go of too lightly, and lives and people I have hung onto too long. I've been complicit in ending lives at the beginning and at the very end. Was I right to do so? I believed I was at the time I was called upon to make these decisions.

Would I agree to these decisions now? I believe I would not.

As the song says,
"You may say to yourself,
'Am I right or am I wrong?'
You may say to yourself,
'My God, what have I done?' "

One of the lessons I have learned bitterly tells me that I cannot know what I would do. These are decisions that cannot be made as hypotheticals and it is foolish to believe otherwise. The essential lessons of life are neither theoretical, legalistic, nor abstract. They are things that can only be decided in the world dimensional; that place where the fire of sin burns within and the bullet meets the bone.

That said, I would also like to say this: Having chosen death too many times in the past, I like to think that I would always, in the end, now choose life. And that no matter how my friends would choose, we would all, at least, understand the yearning towards truth and the yearning towards God, and be able again to become and remain friends.

If you, dear reader, are one of those lost friends I have lost I would bid you to return.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

-- “Song of Myself” By Walt Whitman (1855)