Arkady
President
Salon.com is featuring a story by someone whose far-right uncle freaked out when she politely asked to be taken off a mailing list that had resulted in her receiving hateful right-wing rhetoric:
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/22/my_tea_party_uncle_turned_on_me_the_personal_tale_of_a_close_texas_family/
Ordinarily, I'd assume there was more to the story than that, except I experienced something somewhat similar. A few years back, my family was fairly close to the family of one of my cousins. We'd grown close because we'd each had daughters born within a few weeks of each other. The wives shared mommy advice and the kids shared play-dates, and on Facebook there was a regular exchange of photos of our babies. Each little girl came to think of the other as her best friend. But, in addition, there was also a steady stream of right-wing propaganda coming our way. These people hated Obama in a disturbingly personal way, loved their guns with a totemic intensity, and were certain that everyone who wasn't a mainline Christian was going straight to a well-deserved hell -- especially gays, socialists, Muslims, and liberals.
Mostly, I just ignored that stuff. I'm not terribly active on Facebook -- I have sites like this on which to vent my politics, so I vent to strangers, rather than causing problems in the family. It's not a big deal if I piss off someone here, whereas if someone pisses off a member of the extended family, its sets off waves of animosity from aunt to aunt, cousin to cousin. Thanks to my general silence on political issues, most of my relatives assume I'm conservative: I'm a middle-aged, married, able-bodied, natural-born-citizen white guy with a kid, working in a straight-laced job, with a good income, and raised in a conservative Catholic family. I'd also indulged in plenty of "redneck" pastimes with my family, like shooting and camping. So, assuming I was a fellow conservative wasn't a bad bet. And because they assumed they were talking to a "fellow traveler," I got exposed to pretty unvarnished conservatism from my relatives. Generally, I didn't say much, other than to make extremely mild comments to indicate I didn't agree, like "I don't know about that."
Anyway, at one point I finally spoke up on Facebook, in reply to one of my cousins' conservative diatribes (about guns). I was mild about it -- nothing like I am here. I simply said that they had some of their facts wrong, and linked to a Snopes page that explained the error. That was it. But that's all it took. The cousin and his wife "defriended" us on Facebook, as did his mother. The last thing they sent said that they feel sorry for my family and that they would pray that I saw the light before it was too late. Then they cut off contact. My closest cousin became my most distant one, overnight, and nothing has changed in the year and a half since then, despite my attempt to be friendly at a family event.
I'm puzzled by that kind of intense reaction against even the mildest refusal to take conservative falsehood as gospel. I endure mountains of conservative propaganda, while doing my best to compartmentalize it from my feelings about the person. I figure we all have some weak points in our character, so if we were only friends with perfect people, we'd have no friends at all. But some conservatives I know have a real siege mentality, where the idea of being friendly with non-conservatives (or non-Christians, or non-heterosexuals) is treated like an existential threat to the entire edifice of their self definition. Maybe there's more to my story than I know. Maybe when I uncharacteristically talked back to the conservative propaganda, my cousin asked around about me and found out from some other relative that I was actually a left-leaning atheist, and that's why he and his wife freaked. But, even if that's the case, it doesn't really explain it. Why would it be so difficult to be friendly with a left-leaning atheist?
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/22/my_tea_party_uncle_turned_on_me_the_personal_tale_of_a_close_texas_family/
Ordinarily, I'd assume there was more to the story than that, except I experienced something somewhat similar. A few years back, my family was fairly close to the family of one of my cousins. We'd grown close because we'd each had daughters born within a few weeks of each other. The wives shared mommy advice and the kids shared play-dates, and on Facebook there was a regular exchange of photos of our babies. Each little girl came to think of the other as her best friend. But, in addition, there was also a steady stream of right-wing propaganda coming our way. These people hated Obama in a disturbingly personal way, loved their guns with a totemic intensity, and were certain that everyone who wasn't a mainline Christian was going straight to a well-deserved hell -- especially gays, socialists, Muslims, and liberals.
Mostly, I just ignored that stuff. I'm not terribly active on Facebook -- I have sites like this on which to vent my politics, so I vent to strangers, rather than causing problems in the family. It's not a big deal if I piss off someone here, whereas if someone pisses off a member of the extended family, its sets off waves of animosity from aunt to aunt, cousin to cousin. Thanks to my general silence on political issues, most of my relatives assume I'm conservative: I'm a middle-aged, married, able-bodied, natural-born-citizen white guy with a kid, working in a straight-laced job, with a good income, and raised in a conservative Catholic family. I'd also indulged in plenty of "redneck" pastimes with my family, like shooting and camping. So, assuming I was a fellow conservative wasn't a bad bet. And because they assumed they were talking to a "fellow traveler," I got exposed to pretty unvarnished conservatism from my relatives. Generally, I didn't say much, other than to make extremely mild comments to indicate I didn't agree, like "I don't know about that."
Anyway, at one point I finally spoke up on Facebook, in reply to one of my cousins' conservative diatribes (about guns). I was mild about it -- nothing like I am here. I simply said that they had some of their facts wrong, and linked to a Snopes page that explained the error. That was it. But that's all it took. The cousin and his wife "defriended" us on Facebook, as did his mother. The last thing they sent said that they feel sorry for my family and that they would pray that I saw the light before it was too late. Then they cut off contact. My closest cousin became my most distant one, overnight, and nothing has changed in the year and a half since then, despite my attempt to be friendly at a family event.
I'm puzzled by that kind of intense reaction against even the mildest refusal to take conservative falsehood as gospel. I endure mountains of conservative propaganda, while doing my best to compartmentalize it from my feelings about the person. I figure we all have some weak points in our character, so if we were only friends with perfect people, we'd have no friends at all. But some conservatives I know have a real siege mentality, where the idea of being friendly with non-conservatives (or non-Christians, or non-heterosexuals) is treated like an existential threat to the entire edifice of their self definition. Maybe there's more to my story than I know. Maybe when I uncharacteristically talked back to the conservative propaganda, my cousin asked around about me and found out from some other relative that I was actually a left-leaning atheist, and that's why he and his wife freaked. But, even if that's the case, it doesn't really explain it. Why would it be so difficult to be friendly with a left-leaning atheist?
