I must have a different definition of friendship than most people, because I’m having trouble understanding this:
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — A new survey from Monmouth University shows that seven percent of voters have cut ties with a friend over the 2016 Presidential Race.
CBS News reports that nine percent of Hillary Clinton supporters said they’ve lost a friend because of the election and, 6 percent of Donald Trump supporters have said the same, as well as 3 percent of other voters. Monmouth noted that 7 percent of voters in previous political campaigns have also ended friendships.
So far in my 62 years of life, my true friendships have never been based on political agreement. My political beliefs and those of my friends have spanned the political spectrum. Political views not only vary, they drift back and forth. Now, I have had friends and acquaintances I met through politics, and in those cases it is understandable that my view of them and their view of me might change if our political views were to change, but my actual, real life, friends are people who know me well enough to know that I would never condition genuine friendship on agreement with me. Nor would I establish a close friendship with anyone who conditioned the friendship on agreement. Conditional friends are not real friends.
I would submit that those who say they have “lost” friends because of politics really have not lost friends. Rather, they learned (or should have!) that people who decided to not be their friends over political disagreements were never their friends in the first place. Similarly, those who jettison friendships over political disagreements could not have been friends in the first place.
As to those who condition friendship on political agreement, I just don’t get such a fragile, precarious definition of friendship, and I wonder if such people have any real friends.
Maybe I’m getting too old. I grew up in an era when friends could discuss politics and disagree freely, knowing that such disagreement between friends was healthy for the friendship (if not for the health of a free society).
I guess I should be glad the percentage of people who have lost friends over politics is so low.
They have lost nothing.
Comments
One response to ““Friends” don’t let friends disagree!”
My mother (MSRIP) was a life long Democrat. I couldn’t imagine breaking with her because of politics.
Even when we got into heated disagreement we would always close our conversation with a reference to this:
As my grandpappy always used to say, (in a thick Eastern European accent) “They are all crooks.”
Because he did say that.