I lost a good friend this year due to their political views being so reprehensible to my moral barometer. Mark goes back a good forty years with me. He married a kind and caring wife. We lost track of each other for about 15 years as I dealt with my daughter’s medical issues, but reconnected a few years back. It was like old times.
Mark was the prototypical California kid. Blond, handsome and built like a brick house. Nothing came easy for Mark; everything he has, he earned through hard work. He lost his mother in his teens and his father was a no-show. I admired him greatly.
But the rise of Trump politics changed Mark, and it brought to light his ugly politics. He swallowed Trump’s divisive pill, and his beautiful, hardcore Christian wife followed him. Their Facebook posts talked about Christian morals, and also about how Trump will save our country. Well once they started talking about the caged children like they were things and not people I started to push back. I reminded them of Jesus’s teachings on how we should protect the children and treat strangers and immigrants in need.
Mark and his wife didn’t see it that way at all. The separation of families and the irresponsible way our government lost track of which kids went with which parents was not a problem for them. In their eyes, these people were not eligible for pity, empathy or caring. I could not get them to see that these were people, not animals, and that while we may indeed need to send them back, we didn’t need to treat them so callously. They continued to hate on these children, while also shouting out what great Christians they were and to love thy neighbor.
I finally realized they had no empathy for these kids because deep inside they were racist. I checked out their posts the other day, and they are still on the “Trump won the election” bandwagon. I really am glad I got to see the real people they actually are inside, and not be fooled by the “good God-fearing Christians” face they put on FB.
I still have lots of friends who admire Trump, but they respect my views and they don’t hate on the children of immigrants who come here because their home country is a place where if you stay you die. And they don’t want to die. We may not be able to save them all, but we can treat them all with dignity and respect.