Years ago, my grandmother told me, “To have a friend, you have to be a friend.”
My grandmother did have close friends: Edith, her friend from school, and Imo, her friend from work. Imo and Howard were two of my grandparents’ closest friends as a couple. They were also good friends with another couple, Nev and Lillian, but I don’t think my grandmother was very close to Lillian. Imo was her pal.
My grandmother also carried grudges and resentments for decades. She was a difficult person, but I also never remember her gossiping about any other woman and the most I recall her ever saying about another woman was that she didn’t care for that person or would prefer not to be around them.
I wasn’t raised in a household where gossip and backstabbing was common: if it ever came up, it was always taught to me “Don’t reciprocate, don’t participate.” If you don’t like someone, just stay away from them.
Bruce has been ill since June or July of this year, and I now know who my real friends are. Several people may not have known of his illness, but if they were actual friends, they would have. Others know: and have been scarce since I could no longer participate in a lot of social activities, or since he and I haven’t been able to do much as a couple — much less go out and play music.
When you go through something very challenging and difficult and “friends” never contact you? That should indicate who and what they are. Others have contacted me asking me to do things for them.
But I can’t do a lot: my hands and days are full with helping Bruce and completing work.
Recently another “friend” blew up and exhibited nearly every bad behavior anyone could imagine, one right after the other. First, she aggressively came on to another friend’s partner. Second, when he objected, she accused her partner of beating her up. Third, her stories about the beating didn’t match with what others saw and heard. Fourth, she stated she had certain injuries that only a couple of days later, had magically disappeared. And finally, all the backstabbing, negative comments she’d made behind all of our backs came out.
It was a horrible incident on a micro-level. This type of thing happens every day, all around the world.
Is every person we know capable of such a series of bad choices and poor behaviors?
Maybe.
Would I ever talk with this person again, even if she apologized?
No.
So on a macro-level, the same types of things have been, and continue, to occur. Regardless of how we may feel about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the current military conflict in the Middle East, here is a fact:
Children are dying: many thousands of them.
That’s always wrong. There’s no way to make dead children “good.” It’s wrong. It shouldn’t happen. There is no justification for it.
We should not see public commentary that either Palestinian or Israeli children have suffered justifiable deaths. Thousands of little children are not “justifiable collateral damage.”
Those of us in (for the time being) safe nations like the U.S. are removed from the horrors of military combat zones. Back in the 70s, we fortunate kids in the U.S. just heard TV commenters talking about “The War in Vietnam.” We were too young to see much film of the war. Most of us didn’t see the famous image of the little girl burned by napalm until we were adults.
We didn’t really understand what was going on. It was easy to accept the commentary of leaders that the Vietnam War was “necessary” to “fight communism.”
The words had no real meaning to most U.S. children of that time.
Just like most of us believed that slavery was a problem of the distant past. We didn’t realize what it meant that there would be a minimum wage of $7.25/hour for decades and millions, including thousands of innocent people and thousands more who only committed minor offenses, put in prison made to work to enrich another person.
Back in the day, we were told ecology was good and pollution, which to most of us meant “throwing trash out of the car” — was bad. There were warnings about a global ice age, not global warming. There were warnings that everyone would starve if world population reached 7 billion.
Today, global warming is a reality and while many people go hungry, the reason isn’t a shortage of food. Over 40% of food in the U.S. is wasted. Vast amounts of clothing and other goods go straight from factories to landfills.
My grandmother told me about what happened to her sister Jessie. Jessie had just given birth to her youngest son when she contracted scarlet fever from milk sent around town by a certain dairy. Lots of people got it, but Jessie died when her baby Ted was two weeks old.
It was before the days of antibiotics and especially from anti-viral medications.
My instinct about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it’s a real-world version of movies like 28 Days Later and older films. It seems likely that the COVID virus was biologically engineered. Whether by accident or purposefully, it was released into the world population. Millions have died from the COVID-19 virus. But the world’s population is eight times what it was when Jessie died back in 1913. The COVID pandemic was a public health disaster, but not one that would kill over 4 billion people.
I see on the news that bears are roaming around neighborhoods near the Everglades. It’s not “Gentle Ben,” but it is mother bears and their cubs. Before we left California, coyotes were wandering around our neighborhood in Laguna Woods in broad daylight. They had lost their natural fear of humans, but humans had a lot of fear of them, just as they do the Naples bears (and the large number of alligators in Southwest Florida).
How are all of these things connected?
They are all things that threaten peaceful, happy, healthy lives. They are all things that as individuals, we realistically cannot affect, we can only respond to.
There aren’t just twice as many people on Earth now as there were in 1974, there is exponentially more diversity.
To someone like me, this is a good thing.
To someone who wants every one and every thing to be the same, it’s a frightening thing: a bad thing.
Uniformity and conformity isn’t a good survival strategy and it’s not much of a recipe for a happy, healthy life, either.
Some people want their friends to be exactly the same as they are. I remember back in high school that there were cliques of girls who all looked and acted very similarly. Usually these cliques were led by girls who demanded that their friends conform to and cater to their every rule about appearance, demeanor, who they dated, who else they hung out with: you get the picture. I’m sure you recall both young men and young women who were like this. Back in middle school and high school.
But life’s not middle school or high school.
The world isn’t made better by everyone acting the same, thinking the same, or doing the same.
It’s made better by everyone having similar values and adhering to them.
“To have a friend, you have to be a friend.”
We don’t lie to our friends. We don’t backstab them. We think about them. We do things for them and with them.
Above all, with friends, we obey the Golden Rule: We treat them as we would like to be treated.
At a recent event, we were talking about our former friend who did so many wrong things in such a short time.
One of us said, “I’ve been trying to practice some wisdom lately … Let them …” she said.
In other words, just let the person go on that path no matter how wrong it is and don’t let them hurt you.
There is always a give and take, but being able to just “let them,” I think is good advice — as long as we don’t let them hurt us.
Just let them.
“In other words, just let the person go on that path no matter how wrong it is and don’t let them hurt you.”
But!
It’s so hard to keep our mouths shut and mind our own back yard.
What you said here is one of my main goals in life, because I practice Reiki:
“Just for today, do not anger, do not worry, be grateful. Be true to your way and your being. Have compassion for yourself and others.”
So much of wisdom is releasing the need to control.