A couple of weeks ago I commemorated a girl who died in a car accident forty years ago when she was ten years old. We were friends. The car was driven by her older sister, who was also my friend.
I think Julie’s was the first funeral I went to that wasn’t a family member’s. Hers was the first death of a friend. I had spent hours with her that Friday evening, just as we had done for the past several weeks. Less than twenty-four hours later, she would be dead.
A year later a new girl started at our school. Julie’s sister inexplicably began bullying her. The name-calling was imbecilic. It was something like “butt-head.” But it was relentless and went unabated for weeks.
After lunch one day, the taunts began as usual. But the new girl had had enough. She was ready. She knew what to do. Her response was something along the lines of, “I may be a butt-head, but at least I didn’t kill my sister.”
And after shock and tears and admonishments of “You shouldn’t have said that,” the bullying did stop.
There is still some useful truth to the cliché about what’s fair in love and war. Bullies, no matter how sympathetic, only understand brute force. All this to say, and if you haven’t learned it yet, it’s time to become inimical.
In the US the Republicunts have won a major political victory by building a broad coalition, bringing together such diverse groups as dum-dums, the stupid, half-wits, slow-wits, the witless, the ignorant, the foolish, the idiotic, chuckleheads, and dunderheads, among others. Good on them for clear messaging on issues that resonate across this vast spectrum of American voters.
The way they and the uncritical press tell it, it was the economy, which is why Google broke down several times over the past few weeks with all the “tariff meaning?” and “tariff good?” searches. In Texas alone and across an immense swath of the South, not a single book on macroeconomics remained on the shelves of public libraries because of this great concern with all things economic.
It’s almost as if transphobia, misogyny, racism, and homophobia were merely afterthoughts. All this to say, and if you haven’t learned it yet, it’s time to become inimical.