Michele over at A Big Victory has a new post up about The Politics of Friendship.  You should go read it.

I’ve lost a LOT of friends over the years due to politics.  Some were people I’ve literally known my entire adult life.  Some I’ve known longer than that.  When I stopped calling myself a Democrat and started calling myself an “independant with libertarian tendancies” it got some uneasy laughs when I was home on leave.  You see, Chicago was, is, and probably forever will be a Democrat town.  It makes people nervous when you speak against the Machine…it’s sort of like making fun of the cops, the mayor, the archbishop and the mob all at once…because, well, you are.  People look over their shoulders to see who’s around when talking politics in Chicago…just because. 

More than that, some Chicagoans, for reasons I can’t explain, are PROUD of their radical roots.  They’re proud of The Democrat Convention of ’68.  They’re proud that they had their heads beat in by a cop in Lincoln Park while they “remained non-violent.”  I’m sure there are people who are proud of their association with Bill Ayers.  When I was in high school in the 70s, hippies were cool.  Hippies were legendary.  Hippies are what many of us aspired to be.  Art was important, business and the military were to be sneered at.  Yeah, I know, looking back I can see that I was very, very naive about the ways of the world.

Anyway, as I got older, I became a lot more conservative than I was in high school.  College helped with some of that, the Air Force pushed me a bit further to the right, although I’ve never been able to accept a lot of what “real” conservatives hold dear.  I know I probably wrote this last election cycle, but it’s still true.  I’m too liberal for my conservative friends and too conservative for my liberal friends.  I voted for Bill Clinton twice and I don’t regret it.  I voted for George W. Bush twice and, mostly based on his opponents, I don’t regret that either. 

This year I’m just not all that emotionally invested in the election.  I don’t even want to argue with people I enjoy arguing with.  I’m not voting FOR anyone, I’m voting against someone, knowing that the guy I’m voting for, at best, doesn’t suck as much as the guy I’m voting against…at least that’s what I hope.  ‘Cuz seriously this year doesn’t give us any great choices.  I’m not arguing that much this year about politics.  Maybe just a little at work when I hear someone say something incredibly stupid or just plain wrong.  And this is the first year where I’ve defended both candidates over some seriously deranged rumors flying around a break room.  “No, he’s NOT a Muslim, and so what if he was?/Okay, she spent $150K on clothes, he spent $5M for a freaking stage he used once.” 

I shouldn’t lose any friends this year.  The ones that have already decided to have nothing to do with me based on politics are long gone and at this point, far away.  Most of them, truth be told, left me behind when I joined the Air Force.  They never got it.  The ones that left when I voted for W, I get the feeling were just waiting for a reason to take me off their Christmas Card List.