I’m going to tell you a story. It’s short in length, and long in history. It’s personal. Some people would call this a parable, but I think allegory suits it better. This story takes place across the timeline of an adulthood, from the age of the protagonist’s late teen years, until the present.
It’s valuable from both the perspective of the ‘teller’ of the tale and the ‘receiver’, because the perception of the ‘receiver’ is often obtuse. They can hear well enough, they just don’t really know how to listen, but of course, you’re ‘reading’ this, so there’s that.
I’ll start where most tales begin, seventeen years into my life. I’m kidding, I don’t think it began there, but for the sake of brevity it’s a good place to start.
I was a young Canadian man, once. I know that because now, I’m an old one.
I grew up on the prairies, not literally, like a ground squirrel, but close.
You could say I came from the wrong side of the tracks, but of course being young and naive I didn’t know there were two sides. Life would have to inform me of that fact.
I’ll keep this short, as I can already see your angst.
I met a young man of similar age while playing in a band. We used to practice in a different part of the city, a long way over the tracks, physically and metaphorically.
And as I soon discovered, if you lived on the other side, your view of the world was quite different.
You didn’t drive a vehicle that you bought for $25 which had no floorboards or wheel wells, and you didn’t spend half your winters on your back replacing various electrical and engine components in a frozen back lane at -30 degrees Fahrenheit, trying to take apart something without the right tools.
You simply asked mom for the keys to your mom’s new Charger or your Dad’s Cadillac.
You didn’t live in a wartime house with half a basement, or watch TV on a used console that you hit the side of, just so, in order to get the picture to go vertical.
I met a girl there, I’d say groupy, but I can’t, because we got married about three years later.
In any event, the ‘young man’, which I’m sure you’ve already forgotten, played in another band, but was a friend of all of the band members that I was a member of.
We got to know each other fairly well over a year of playing, and he would bring his girlfriend, who happened to also be from the wrong side of the tracks, a mere block away from my home.
Time went by, we graduated from high school, but remained ‘friends’ and as time went on both entered the world of ‘work’.
I was accepted to become an officer in the navy, heading off to university at Canada’s military training University in the fall. My friend meanwhile was looking for a job after graduation. I was to start U in the fall, but took a job for a brief time as a ‘loans officer’ at a credit union.
My boss was a genuinely great guy, and knew I would be leaving shortly, but hired me anyway. After a quite brief employment history, I found that I had been successful in an application for a ‘exchange program’, as a prospective naval aviator, with the U.S. Navy in San Diego aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation. I was to be spend the next six months aboard ship, which was undergoing refit after having returned from Vietnam in the spring.
Upon learning that I was leaving, prematurely, I asked my friend if he would be interested in taking my position at the credit union. He said he’d love to, and I subsequently introduced him to my boss, who then hired him.
I left shortly thereafter as a newly minted Midshipman, for what was to me a major experience serving aboard a floating city, which though in refit, still housed several thousand naval personnel and marines.
That summer ‘flew’ by, no pun intended, and at the end of my exchange, in late August, I was ready to enter the ROTP or Regular Officer Training Program for the Royal Canadian Navy.
It was at that point that the wings of my planned future, fell off.
A certain Prime Minister of Canada, well known for his urbane yet arrogant personality, decided to disassemble the Royal Canadian Navy. As a pacifist, I assume he was simply bored. To make a long story short, the Naval Air Arm, which I was to be assigned to upon graduation from University was disbanded, and with that fact, my options as a naval aviator, also flew south.
In any event, I was given the option of becoming a rotary pilot at that point, but chose against it as a friend of mine, a civilian rotary aviation pilot had learned that the helicopter could not remain airborne or autorotate at less than 500 feet, and crashed, whereupon he became a paraplegic.
But I digress.
I transferred back to the Naval Reserve, instead of pursuing a life attempting to keep an unstable airframe aloft while hopeful of staying alive.
So this is where the story actually begins. Sorry for all the preamble, but I was just warming up.
Over the ensuing next several years (we’re flying now), both I and my ‘friend’ married and found our vocational futures, he interestingly in the same line of work where I got him his first job as the manager of a credit union, and I as a firefighter for the City we both lived in. One of about half a million souls in a famously cold city, half of whom never realized that living across a railway line meant that you were lesser in some way.
Within a few more years (God, life is short isn’t it?) I had two daughters and we would as a troop, along with my friend and his brood of two offspring, go to my in-laws cabin in a beautiful Provincial Park almost every weekend to relax, fish, boat and suntan.
Life being what it is, this couldn’t last, and my wife and I became distant and after more years of pretence, we divorced.
But this is where the story really begins. Really.
My friend and his family had applied for a position in the United States, at the American Head Office and subsequently, moved south. We continued our long-distance ‘friendship’ and I flew down to Denver and visited some of my favourite sights in the Rockies for a few days.
I had noticed a change in ‘behaviour’ from my friend and his wife subsequent to my divorce, but didn’t make much of it, as they are a rather busy couple. However, upon my return North I subsequently contacted them as I was to be heading south on business and would be in the ‘neighbourhood’.
My ‘friend’ then disclosed that he had converted from simply being a ‘run of the mill’, somewhat irreligious Protestant to having become a “born again Christian — praise be”.
I truly didn’t think much of it, in the sense that our friendship had by now been ongoing for twenty-five years. I had met another woman and had begun a relationship, and we decided that we’d take a vacation to the Caribbean, on a cruise for two weeks. I contacted my ‘friend’ and said I’d be not too far from the state, and maybe we could get together.
He deferred, stating that his wife would be in New York on business and I simply stated, “No problem… another time.”
As life is want to be, time passed and we kept in touch by Facebook.
During the period from 1982 until 2006, I had attended university and completed two undergraduate degrees and my masters, during which I became heavily involved in scientific study and its applications.
I contacted him one day by Facebook, left a couple of messages, with no response.
I waited a couple of weeks and then tried calling him on the phone. Phone disconnected.
I subsequently sent him a IMessage from Facebook, and was essentially surprised, maybe I should restate that, — I was shocked to be told that I was not worthy of being a friend anymore because I was not a born again Christian, and as an believer in science and not God, as an agnostic he could not have anything to do with me.
Personally, I thought he was kidding, until I disappeared as a ‘friend’ from his Facebook account.
By this time I had been teaching college at night for almost ten years.
It struck me that his ‘beliefs’ and his ‘belonging’ to the Evangelical Church was hard at work reinforcing the walls of his belief. Group Think had taken over from informed dialogue.
I could still see his Facebook feed, which began to make a strange transition from reality to the surreal.
In the space of months, he became a full-blown Evangelical Fundamentalist cult member, and by 2015 was attending “MAGA Rallies’ in and around the Southern U.S..
He was no longer a rational human being, but a MAGAN of the first order.
I subsequently have not attempted to reach out.
And then the topper.
My ex-wife and he had remained friends, although she is also not either religious or an evangelical.
In the course of a conversation after having travelled down for a visit, she informed me that I was now the ‘enemy’ of God, according to my friend, and should not contact them again.
Politics Mirrors Life
I have now, not spoken or had any contact with my former ‘friend’ for about 15 years. His disgust at my lack of ‘belief’ has further emboldened me to go from being an agnostic to atheist. None of that transition was due to his behaviour. It is simply obvious to anyone who believes in scientific methodology that proof is requisite for me to ‘believe’ in whatever the subject is. Proof and truth are absolutely essential to my ‘being’.
Belief, without proof, is to me, not a strategy for life.
America’s transition from rationality and intelligence, to insular and suspicious of all others, has illustrated to me how America itself has made the transition from former ally, to friend, to acquaintance. The actions of the United States, especially since Trump’s arrival on the political scene illustrates how a nation can become not just untrusted, and untrustworthy, but the enemy of truth, alliance or even friendship.
Over the past 25 years, my relationship with my ‘friend’ of forty years was capable of complete demolition by the lies and actions of both religion and what has now become full-blown political fascism within the United States.
I found that the transition from friend to enemy, now essentially a fact, as America itself can no longer be trusted, respected, or its actions tolerated, means that as a fascist state, the United States is he enemy of reason and democracy in the world. It is now, unequivocally the actual enemy of intelligent action.
And as such, my enemy.
Neither my ‘enemies’, nor the United States of America illustrate actions that I can either accept or are willing to tolerate.
Continuous threats, coercion, tariffs, lies, and the mass murder of innocents around the world in the name of nothing more than as stated by Trump, “having the opportunity” to murder other human beings, without any rational proof as to ‘why’ or to ‘what end’ is anathema to me.
America has transitioned from Friend to Enemy in the space of less than fifteen years.
And as such, I will neither trust or travel to the United States of America again in my lifetime.
Nor do I or will I buy anything produced there.
There is, it would seem at least a correlation with how America has become a nation that no longer cares to represent the truth, loyalty, trust or honourable acts or intentions towards what were once loyal allies, friends and neighbours, — with its acceptance of Evangelical Fundamentalism. To me, the hypocrisy is so clearly evident and so intrusive into the political reality of America, that for the vast majority of Canadians, it can no longer be trusted to make rational decisions and therefore be trusted at all.
I have not visited the United States since Trump’s arrival in the political arena, and have absolutely no wish to do so again in my lifetime. And yet, the US lies forty miles from my front door in North Vancouver, BC.
America’s fascist actions and extreme right-wing plutocratic, kleptocratic and fascist actions mean that I am now as far from supporting America, as I think anyone can actually be and not be considered a danger.
America is no longer a democracy, and its hate and xenophobia have destroyed its future, and any interest that most of us north of the border ever had in America.
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