This question’s on my mind because my coworker today mentioned they would vote for Trump if they could (mind you this is 2023, in Canada). I don’t generally have the talking points or the desire to fight about it, so I just deflected the conversation. But I often wish I was more strong-willed and could try to figure out why someone believes what they do and, if it’s invalid, then convince them otherwise.
Thus, I’m curious what you all would say or what you’ve done in the past!
My least favorite politicians literally want me to not exist. They want me erased, exterminated, gone. It’s extraordinarily unlikely for me to end up friends with someone who would vote for that sort of person to begin with. Given my volitile political position, this question just feels goofy to me. People I consider friends are a rarefied order, a small and select group. I would be shaken to my core to find out that one of them felt this way. It would destroy my sense of reality and grasp of the world. I’d wonder if I was schizophrenic. But I really don’t think that’s going to happen. People aren’t my friends if they don’t support my rights, nevertheless my existence.
The privilege it is to even ask this question is extremely telling. I don’t mean that as a slight to OP, but it is worth noting that we are in a place where, for a non-insignificant amount of people, this isn’t even remotely a possibility because one group has made their existence criminal.
Right? Like, I guess if one of my few friends got a serious brain injury and become a totally different, terrible person, I’d sob for hours, maybe days, mourning the person I lost. But that’s the caliber of life event it would take. None of these people are going to get a new job or new partner and become a murderous bigot. Often this sort of change in a person is predicated by something personal, someone in their life from the relevant group hurts them. But I’m the truama informed friend that everyone comes to when fucked up things happen. If someone deeply and personally hurt one of my friends to the point that it could change them as a person, they’d be on my couch, smoking my weed, processing with me.
Sometimes your friends change for the worse and you find yourself in such a situation.
I just really don’t see any of the small group of gay women and stoners in my life turning against me like that. It would literally be a shift from friends to voting for my death. My least favorite politicians don’t just believe things I disagree with. They may not be able to say it publicly, but they want me dead. Even if we were no longer friends, I don’t think anyone in my small circle would vote for anyone to be systematically eliminated. Hell, many of them would themselves be in the sights of the same politicians. My best friend would probably be the other type of girlfriend to me if she wasn’t in a long term relationship when we met.