Tolerating Racism, Long Ago

FORTY YEARS AGO I befriended a young married couple, the wife the little sister of a hugh school buddy. Actually, she befriended me, and with her, her new hubby. The hubby, like I, was an avid baseball fan, and the three way friendship worked quite well. The only fly in the ointment, so to wpeak, was that she was a racist, severely and proudly so, a bona fide KKK type. She would yell obscenities at the TV when public service announcments for the Negro College Fund would come on. It was that bad. When she was out of the room I would say "gee whiz", and her hubby would say: "Yeah, she's got it bad". But, we both lover her, and, as Goethe said, "He loves not who does not consider the faults of the beloved virtues". Well, maybe.There was never any problem. In those days it was easier to tolerate racism among us crackers, if not accept it. Since 1980 society has changed much, and so have I. I remember the days just a couple of years ago when a far right harridan of a woman told me that Democrats are "intolerant". You are quite right replied, we are indeed intolerant, of racism, economic inequality, poverty, and climate change, things of which republicans seem more tolerant. I like to think that with age I have become more tolerant of that which should be tolerated, and more intolerant of that which should not be, and that I know the difference. The young lady who was so frightfully unashamedly racist forty years ago has been through several intervening marriage, has doubtless grown up, is now sixty, and I suspect has long since outgrown her racism, and would be ashamed to even admit that she was ever reacist to begin with. But I suspect she was and still is a Trump supporter, because when I started spreading anti-Trump hatred all over Facebook, she "unfriended" me. Oh well, her loss. Trump supporters might not be all racists, but they are all certainly willing to not only tolerate but support a person who demonstrably is, according to everyone who knows him. So she has changed, as we all do, but only superficially, as we all do, not fundamentally. The problem with being intolerant of other people's undesirable traits is that the more intolerant one is, and the more vocal about it, the fewer friends one has, and the more friends one loses. Friends like to be flattered, not criticized. As a good friend of mine says, we must accept the bad traits of our friends, or we have no friends. I've lost many freinds by being to honest about what i consdier to be their bad traits. But only when I found the bad traits so unacceptable that I was willing to lose the friend on account of them. Actually, we alwasy have teh choice of risking friendship with honesty, as goethe said: "freedom is nothing other than teh opportunity to do what is reasonable under all circumstances" Sometimse losing friends, unfortunately, is the most reasonable course of action.Now I have no racist friends, and won't, and, considering the state of American society, culture, and the people who comprise it, sometimes solutide seems like the best approach, especially during a long pandemic.