The friend I didn’t know I needed

There are different types of friendships that we make in life. We have the friend that will dislike every ex we have, regardless of blame. We have the friend that will agree with us to make sure we feel safe or secure. We have the friend that disagrees with us at every turn to harass us.

I began my twitter journey because I wanted to tweet and talk about politics. Facebook became an uncomfortable battleground with family and friends concerning politics. I needed a new venue that I could scream into the void about my own angers and frustrations.

Twitter was not the experience I was expecting it to be.

Twitter is a community and in some cases, family. One can share silly photos of animals with a certain group of people while celebrating and debating sports. All of that was ok, but I was there for the politics.

Twitter has its own etiquette and language. One must learn to condense their thoughts down to 280 characters, which is no easy task. Not long after joining and making an errant comment, I learned what it meant to be ratioed or otherwise known as being “dragged.”

What I most wanted out of my Twitter experience though, was understanding. How could anyone support Trump? How could anyone logically take one mans actions and justify them? Or was I missing something.

On that journey I met my friend, who we will call Vet. He’s ex army, dyed in the wool Republican, and all around bad ass. There was an issue though, he support Donald J. Trump.

I feel it important to distinguish between engagements before I move too much farther. I believe there are two kinds of engagment on twitter: those in good faith and those that are not. You can have a discussion with someone who enters a conversation in good faith. The other, you cannot.

My journey took awhile before I figured out the two different styles. The ones that are not in good faith generally carry on and on and will ignore any type of refutation. There is a name for them, trolls.

The block feature is one of the greatest Twitter features ever made, just saying.

I don’t remember my first conversation with Vet, however, we disagreed on something. We share a love of the second amendment and to our country. While I lean more libertarian left, he leans over, sometimes falling off the cliff, to the right. I don’t believe he’ll be angry at me for saying that.

It turned out, Vet was the friend I needed.

He challeneged me and my belief systems in way I had never truly been challenged. Those challenges came from honest and good faith discussions on complex issues from abortion to gay rights to frustration of big government.

Just a spoiler, I did not convert to becoming a Republican.

My friendship with him however did help me to pull more to Libertarian, which I was on my way to becoming in any case. That was not why I needed his friendship though. I didn’t need his friendship to try to convince me that Trump was a good man or that the GOP would save the country.

Vet was the friend I needed to become more at peace with my anger against the GOP.

My friend is a veteran and a hero in my book. He’s a married man and a father. He’s a Christian, in the truest sense of the word. He doesn’t judge me for who I am or what I believe and in turn I do the same for him. But he’s widened a world that had become narrow and filled with anger and hate.

It’s not all rainbows and sunshine, I promise you.

There are days that I want to shake him and say, “What are you thinking?” I am certain there are days that he wants to do the same to me. But there is a gentleness to our anger. An asterisk if you will.

There are subjects that we will not discuss with one another because there is no need to. They are few and they are sacred. They are boundaries of respect. Those boundaries aren’t there because we aren’t man enough to confront them, but they are there because we are both cemented in them in our personal beliefs. I respect his views. He respects mine.

We stay out of the Twitter fire when those arise on our timelines.

He has become like a brother to me and I believe the same is true in reverse. There have been several ocassions I’ve jumped into a thread ready to verbally punch someone in the nose for coming after him. Not because he can’t defend himself, he can.

Why am I writing about this? What’s the point?

The point is pretty simple. In our polarized and angry politics, it’s so easy to become blindsided by hatred. It’s easy to have a “Us VS Them” mentality that carries into the blindside of our hearts. I’m certainly no exception.

My friendship with Vet has saved me on many ocassions from falling into the abyss of subjectivity instead of objectivity. His friendship has become a port in the storm to safely say the things I am feeling in anger towards the GOP.

He listens.

The comes the thing I don’t want to hear sometimes, the other side of the story.

While it’s nice to have a friend that always agrees with you or will jump into a fight with you, it’s essential you have a friend that can speak honest truth to your own anger. What is just as valuable, is a friend that asks the same of you in return.

I challenge you to truly befriend someone that doesn’t think the way you do. Try to embrace and expand your experience not to change you philosophy or beliefs, but to accept that others beliefs are just as valid as your own. Especially when they are opposite your own.

I have stopped over generalization of anger towards Republicans because of my friendship with Vet because now, I have a friend that is a die hard Republican. I can’t paint with that broad brush anymore and I am forced to rethink my preconceptions.

I challenge you to find the friend you didn’t know you needed.

@RdavisJ1