Values Voting

I guess this topic is particularly a propos in view of the current presidential campaign, but that's not what has prompted this post.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the "breakup" with LC.  I am less hurt than left wary.  How will I know, next time, if I confide in someone about how I am feeling, that they won't see that as a violation of their values in some way and decide to dump me because our correspondence isn't "working"?  How can I trust anyone again?

I will have to say that this has never happened to me before.  Friends and I have drifted apart.  There have been people I have made a point of interacting less with, if I felt we didn't have much in common (not really true here) or if I found that the more I knew them the less I liked them, but letting go was a process, not a violent act.  Slamming a door is a violent act.

My mother was a "values voter" and in fact, referring back to this post, all the ruptures between my mother and LC, and between my mother and her mother, were about values.  My mother didn't like the fact that LC's mother appeared oblivious to the political situation in Greece or the fact that LC cruelly sent a shelter dog to its death (one she had claimed to be madly in love with) rather than mop up after it for a few more weeks or months.  My mother "voted with her feet" to end other friendships over values as well.  With one woman it was because she had voted for Reagan and read Commentary magazine. With another it was that she bought expensive shoes and didn't donate money to PBS.

I would like to think that I don't operate that way.  To me, there is nothing more important than a friendship, and I only judge people based on how they treat me, or perhaps as well on how I see them treating others.  I can't imagine totally cutting someone off because of what they say they think or how they say they feel.  If I cry over a deleted video and LC cries over a mass shooting, that does not give her the moral high ground.  Neither one of us has made the world a better (or a worse) place based on what triggers our tears.

Or maybe she didn't like that I referred to myself as "underprivileged".  Yes, I know, context is everything, and that's why I scrape together money from time to time to give to the church food pantry.  However underprivileged I feel living in a sea of highly paid professionals married to highly paid professionals who go away four and five times a year (or every weekend!), I have enough food and I have a (very nice) place to live.  But why should someone else care how I want to benchmark myself?  I could understand her being upset if I had been stingy with her in some way as a result of thinking that, but why was that any of her business?  I think abruptly ending a friendship is much crueler than anything a person might opine (or not opine) about.

Maybe it's a UU thing.  Even though I consider myself to be a UU (or more accurately, a nineteenth century Unitarian like Susan B. Anthony and Louisa May Alcott), I never cease to be amazed at their smarmy sanctimoniousness.  In addition to dispensing with a lot of the "magical thinking" of Christianity (what I like about UUs), they also seem to have dispensed with the Christian notion of charity, not just toward the poor, but toward the "sinner".  So if LC thinks I am shallow and selfish (I can't imagine what else it is that caused her to end our friendship that she doesn't want to tell me) shouldn't that be a reason for her to pity me and be charitable? (Only half said tongue in cheek.)  And was my selfishness so egregious that she couldn't just say something like "We don't seem to be on the same page right now, so why don't we take a time out?"

What I said to her in my final response is true.  I don't care if she doesn't like me as she is not a part of the fabric of my life.  But I am angry.  She got to dump me and feel self righteous and there's nothing I detest like self righteousness.  Really good people don't talk about how good they are all the time.

And no one who has done all the things I have done for my partner in her declining years can be considered selfish.  I have a clear conscience if nothing else.