In my aim of creating myself as the person I want to be, I realize that the bottom line, for me, is truth.
If I aim for truth, I’m on the right track.
So much of my life I’ve compromised, accepted discrepancies of my own behavior that didn’t align with my beliefs and values. My rationalization was “everybody does it.”
I feared that if I adhered rigidly to my ideas of “right” and '“wrong” that would make me even more judgmental than I already was, and one of my beliefs was that it’s wrong to be judgmental.
In many of my friendships, I accept someone else whose behavior in their own lives does not correspond to what I believe is honest and ethical. I accept their shortcomings because the good far outweighs the flaws and I can accept that their personal values are not the same as mine. I know nothing of their own internal struggles. I do know that they feel obligated to keep secrets because if their lives were transparent, others would get hurt.
As I work on becoming the person I want to be, several qualities are important: honesty and a commitment to the truth, integrity, and doing no harm.
I do not feel that, in order to be friends with someone, they have to adhere to the same standards I’ve set for myself. But I aim to be friends for the most part with people who share my values.
I had a friend, someone I considered a good friend. I believed we shared the same values. We could have disagreements, but for the most part I experienced her as being kind, helpful to others, compassionate and empathic. We disagreed politically, but our solution to that was simply not to discuss politics.
This was all fine and good, until now. When she told me that she and her husband were Trump supporters, she added that “Sure, he’s not a very admirable person, but we all have our flaws.” I wanted to say “But not like that!” I can understand being fiscally conservative, wanting less government controlling what we do, less involvement in social programs…but what has been going on in our country in the past two years is very very different than something that would constitute a difference in political affiliation.
There have been several events that I have found so upsetting that the word “upsetting” is too mild a term.
The demolition of the East Wing of the White House. That was my house (and your house) and no permission was given to tear it down.
The dissolution of USAID, not only because 250,000 people lost their jobs, but the Lancet of July 2025 published an estimation of 14 million people who will die because they will not received the aid USAID would have provided worldwide.
On February 28 this year 168 girls were killed when an unprovoked U.S. missile strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, girls between the ages 7 and 12, girls who were sent off to school by mothers who I imagine packed their lunches never imagining that their daughters would not be returning home. The air strike was ordered by Trump without the approval of Congress.
On January 3 of this year, a U.S. raid captured Venezuela’s president in a move not seen in decades. President Maduro and his wife were abducted in the middle of the night in a raid that killed 23 Venezuelan security officers.
The United States military says it has sunk 15 boats and killed 61 people in the Caribbean and Pacific this year claiming, without proof, that these fishing boats were being used to smuggle drugs.
Trump has been involved in the criminal activities including pedophilia of late Jeffrey Epstein.
He destroyed the White House’s rose garden, paving it over for social gatherings.
Trump’s dishonesty has been recognized with multiple “Lie of the Year” awards by fact-checkers. Trump’s prolific lying is considered unprecedented in U.S. politics, and this scorecard aims to quantify and contextualize that phenomenon.
And let’s not even talk about January 6.
Back to my friend who supports Trump. When I found that it became increasingly difficult for me to maintain a superficial friendship in which weather, food, shopping at farmers’ markets, etc. were the usual topics of discussion, I wrote her expressing my dismay at Trump’s destructiveness, lack of compassion and cruelty, I asked her to answer two questions hoping to be able to maintain some semblance of friendship that I had valued for over 40 years. The two questions were:
Do you think your values align with those of Donald Trump? and
Do you think what Trump is doing now will ultimately benefit the United States?
She refused to answer the questions. She told me that she experienced me as being angry and she preferred to remember me as being the “kind” person I used to be. I told her I was still “kind,” if not more so than I used to be. Her response is that “politics” should not enter into our being friends.
I don’t see the current situation as being political. I consider what the current administration is doing as being a moral and ethical crisis, similar to what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and frighteningly far removed from what the Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution.
I grieve the loss of my friend, but it really is the loss of the friend I thought she was. Someone with whom I shared values, whose sense of fairness and justice and compassion I could count on.
And I grieve the loss of the country I thought we were (but realize we really never were). And when “this” is all over (soon I hope), perhaps we can build the country we envisioned, aim for the ideal we thought we’d achieved. With freedom and justice for all.
One thing we can all do to set us on a path of creating the country we can feel proud of, a country that has allies and close ties with other democratic countries, a country that is committed to equality, racial and economic, a country that adheres to ideals of helping others less fortunate and enacting legislation that benefits its citizens––one thing we can do is vote. Vote to eliminate those who would enable the concentration of power in one whose sense of decency and compassion is so totally lacking .
Vote as if your future and the future of your children depends on it. Because it does.
Wow. Thank you for sharing, Patricia. I wonder if people who are enthralled by Donald Trump would want their own children/grandchildren to embody his "virtues"? Would they want their flesh and blood to be able to look them in the eye and (maybe somewhat less than 30,000 fact-checked) lie to their faces? Would they want this to be their legacy for future generations?
My own dear father was a man of integrity. In our discussions, his questions were always, "Did you do your best?" and " If you had it to do all over again, would you still do the same?"
I'm so sorry. I went through a similar experience. A friend left the UK many years ago for the US, settled there and married an American. She was an early supporter and became more vehement and more vocal in her beliefs as time went on. I tried for a long time until I couldn't.