Both readers of this long-running (and at times long-dormant) blog
likely remember many-years' friend Spartacus. A quick visit to the searchbox there on this page's northwest corner will turn up a warm number of times where he's very illuminatively weighed
in on something I've passed along here, or has himself shared something of
particular note. He's even taken the blog's mike – well, keyboard – more than
once. Go ahead; check 'em out.
We met in elementary school more years ago than I can believe, and
with mutual friend Eileen were the Huey, Dewey, and Louie of the playground.
Then after just a couple fun and busy years, Spart's family moved a number of
state lines away, and after a few letters we fell out of touch.
About three decades later (that can't be right), I located him
online and reached out... and in a particularly short time we were close friends all over
again. I found him to be sharp-minded, knowledgeable among a dizzyingly wide range of
fields, including avionics and history of both Europe and of music. He is
skilled in a number of art media, from intricate model aircraft, to palette and
canvas, to fine-crafted (and rough-hewn) wood, to electronic music, and far
more yet. I admire (and have envied) these exceptional skills... and have very
few equivalents of my own.
We found ourselves on largely parallel paths politically as well,
pitched well to the left of center: distrustful of entrenched politicians;
advocate of the overlooked and underrepresented; anti-NRA, anti- big-business,
anti-conservative, and so on. Economically, he considered himself an
anarcho-syndicalist, while I was beginning to discover distributism.
And thus we were for a good many more years, buddies over the
miles and internet, armchair scientists (and SF-readers), fellow snarkers via
email, occasionally visiting each other's homesteads and families, and sharing
tales of respective journeys and discoveries, and the every-so-often off-color chuckle.
Yet at the time that our now-adult friendship began to coalesce,
my Catholic faith was returning to me, and vice-versa. Over the succeeding
years it continued to deepen and flesh out, and enrich and inform and direct my
inner life and values... in turn directing my outer actions.
Spartacus is (I believe) agnostic, and distrustful of organized
religion... and I can't blame him, given the wealth of religious hypocrites and
the hypocrisy of the wealthy "religious". Throughout nearly all our
modern-years' friendship, he has been especially polite and respectful in regards to my
ever-deepening faith, keeping his own read and opinion silently to himself.
This was very rare to find, and I appreciated it. Nor has it ever been in my
nature be a proselytizer, so I had no sense that what my heart had come to
embrace could come across to him as obnoxious.
The growth in me of faith led to a shift in how I applied it to
the world around me, most especially socially and politically. I was proud to
have voted – twice – for an African-American for president, even while finding
a growing discomfort within at how closely the Democratic Party, and seemingly
its entire slate, from Commander-In-Chief to downtown dogcatcher, had blindly and resolutely aligned
itself with values and objectives I could no longer align myself with, not
and be the Catholic I wanted and needed to be. I've been a registered Democrat
since my late teens, but, to paraphrase St. Thomas More, I am the king's good
servant – and the Lord's first.
One of those troubling political thrusts is abortion... and long
before Barack Obama finished out his second term, I realized I simply could no
longer mark the ballot checkbox next to any candidate supporting that issue. At
some other place on this blog, I'd like to detail why it's glaringly clear that
abortion is cold-hearted infanticide, hand-in-glove with racism and entrenched
political misogyny. Right now, and in immediately following posts, we're
looking at a maelstrom-sized, inexplicable sea-change in a greatly valued friend, man, buddy...
and that same rich and world-spanning sea turned shallow and stagnant and
unnavigable.
And so at the next election – 2016 – I greatly wanted to cast my vote for the country's first major-party woman candidate for president... and simply could not. The alternative was to not vote, which would be to abandon my social duty, or to select another candidate. Decades ago, faced with a similar pair of unpalatable opponents, my father defiantly wrote in Mickey Mouse on his ballot.
I considered that, but chose instead to vote for the candidate
most likely, if possible, to beat the former First Lady... and that happened
to be the arrogant, pompous, womanizing jerk Donald Trump – who had also come down firmly
on the pro-life side, where I myself was anchored. So come election day, I
pinched my nose hard enough that it nearly bled, and pulled his box's lever.
We know how that election turned out; more later.
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