A lot has been said and written about friends and friendship. How challenges become easy, our lives less scary, and moments memorable when lived with friends. For most people, their friends hold the topmost position in their life after family. That’s just how friends are, right? We love them. Especially those friendships which we form at a very young and tender age, when our hearts are pure, minds uncorrupted, and times are simple. We think that they are our friends for LIFE. We don’t make friends with a thought in mind that one day we will just drift apart, i.e. we’ll be LOSING FRIENDS OVER POLITICS!
But yes, here we are in 2021, where we casually use the word dystopia because people feel like it, where we are reading George Orwell’s 1984 and can relate with most parts of it. And the most baffling part is that while some of us are calling the world in which we live a dystopian reality, another set of people are calling it a utopia. This is baffling because I don’t understand how someone can’t see the injustices that are happening every second, the world where human life has no value, where just eight billionaires have as much net worth as half the human race. And things get tricky when you realize that your friends are those people.
Perception of a broken friendship
At first, you feel gutted that the friend whom you loved the most, with whom you have spent some of the most memorable moments of your life supports a political leader who is homophobic, racist, islamophobic who is making policies that are affecting millions of people’s lives, who is tearing apart a country, it’s people, who is creating a divide so big that another universe can fit into it, who is responsible for killing so many innocent people. Then you start talking less, instead of talking every day now you just talk once a week, and even during that time you try to avoid “those controversial topics”, those debates because eventually it will hurt both of you and affect your relationship. Then come two types of people: those who continue like that for the sake of a very long friendship, who compromise with their morals and get used to the conversations which are full of awkward silences and unset rules and those who can’t compromise with their morals, who can’t avoid the blatant ignorance and support of fascism by their friends, who are done with the never-ending debates of Right VS Left and acceptable VS unacceptable, and who then cuts all the ties and cease to talk to them completely.
Moving On From Loss
Many of us have become accustomed to it. Of course, losing friends hurts, but the reason hurts the most. But after some time you come to terms with the fact that your set of morals and principles are completely different than theirs, that you value your morals more than that years-long friendship, that it’s not your fault that your friends, champions a monstrous regime and doesn’t have human decency, that you are not selfish for standing up against injustice and ignorance, and that it’s okay to be losing friends over politics.