False Friends

Maybe I was feeling more cynical than usual or was just tired or just couldn't take one more passive aggressive, saccachrine sweet post about coming together. Maybe I'd had all the hypocrisy I could stand for one day. Or maybe I didn't want to listen to one more word of preaching from one more holier-than-thou false friend. It had taken quite a long time to see it but I finally realized that her condescending can't-we-all-get-together crap was remarkably one sided. All those heartfelt, “Just my opnion” posts leaned sharply right but were so couched in civility that I'd been blinded, had envied her refusal to call a spade a spade, had thought she was a genuine peacemaker. She could, I now dismally understood, sling mud with the best of them and it wasn't pretty.

“Enough lectures on compassion and niceness and Mr. Rogers,” I say outloud and hit delete. I'll miss her music but not her moral superiority or her superficial charity.

It's always unsettling to confront an unpleasant truth but it's worse to find out you've been had.

There are people in the world who, for whatever their private reasons may be, intentionally keep you from knowing who they really are. You admire their sense of fairness, their oft expresed tolerance, their small and capital C christian values of kindness humility, and faith. You think they practice what they preach and are encouraged to follow their example and look for the good in people. And then one lazy afternoon, you stumble into their underneath and find it's mean spirited, two faced, and cruel.

I'm not naive or innocent enough to think that we all don't have a little of the hypocrite in us but I still want to believe that for most of us, our public face is not all that different from the one we see in the mirror. At least, I hope so.