Day 523 of Staying the Fuck Inside
How many friends have you lost?
Not to COVID. Not to death.
How many friends have you lost due to them falling into a rabbit hole of absurd information, and refusing to climb out?
How many frends have you lost to religious cults, sex cults, philosophical cults, poltical cults?
How many friends have you lost, whose final words are “do the research!”
How many friends have you lost, because you are “sheeple” to them?
How many friends have you lost, who were bright, intelligent, and compassionate, except when reality simply wasn’t fascinating, interesting, or “realistic” enough for them?
How many friends have you lost, who despite their many positive qualities would have no qualms about you being collateral damage in the apocalypse that they’re creating in their minds, because you deserve it for not “waking up” and emancipating yourself from the shackles of the Illuminati, the NWO, Big Pharma, Big Ag, or the Reptilian Agenda?
Do you mourn the loss?
Or is one equally lost and not compassionate for losing them?
Are you lost to each other, separated by a chasm of inability to communicate based on one person believing things that the other doesn’t, each feeling that the other has shortcomings based on not accepting Certain Ideas as credible?
I lost a friend today, because the threshold of things he believes that I don’t, has now exceeded not only numerical limits, but qualitative limits.
I suspect I will mourn my loss more than he may mourn his. Because I know who he is without the extraneous beliefs, and he was a good friend, a powerful intellect, a talented musician, and a deep thinker. He will suspect I have shortcomings for not being able to embrace some of the ideas he’s willing to. But he knows plenty of others who do, and who will. I put up with the religious cult, and the (hate to say it, completely wrong, and completely unrequested) “horoscope” (for lack of a better term) he created for me.
I shrugged.
I put up with the conspiracies surrounding “Big Ag,” as I don’t believe in telling people what foods they can and cannot eat.
But I can’t, in good faith, turn a blind eye to not only spreading misinformation about the current global health crisis, but the lack of compassion about those who have died, will die, and furthermore will die unnecessarily from the misinformation that is being spread.
And worst of all, I know my rebuttals will fall on deaf ears, because I haven’t “done the research” (as he, and people like him, constantly demand). And since I haven’t embraced the foundational reality that his guru has described, there’s no point in arguing that, either. Especially when it fortifies its defenses with in-group jargon.
Arguing is pointless when you’re starting from entirely different premises.
How many friends have you lost?
I’ve lost a few, here and there.
I lost another one today.