I just saw a video someone shared on Facebook that was in no way supposed to be funny, but it was funny to me.
It wasn’t supposed to be funny, it was actually just facts and science.
It amazingly wasn’t there to make a political point either, but it did to me.
It was funny and political to me because it reminded me of one of the last discussions I had with someone, and it was pretty much the only discussion we had ever had. Most of our interactions had been political arguments.
It became pretty much the last discussion or argument that we ever had. There had been many arguments and only one discussion.
It came on a very strategic day, but I’m not even sure that I realized it at the time.
It was at a bar and grill and would become the last time that I talked to a lot of people there, because it was a going away party for a particular person that had pretty much been the only bond that kept most of those people interacting with each other. He was the bridge between everyone and without him you would have to consciously swim to interact, which would have been a lot harder and would have required effort and intent.
Behind it all was politics, but no politics were actually discussed.
What was clear was that I had hated Donald Trump since 1987, when my grandmother bought me a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” a book full of lies that he did not have much to do with writing.
I often like to talk about how much I learned from a book full of lies that had little input from the supposed author of the book.
That had been my point about all education from soon after I read it. If you started with a book that you loved, it could not only take you places that it could take you anywhere. It didn’t even matter if the book was totally filled with lies as long as you were willing to have an open mind to the truth.
Sometimes the source’s lies are so absurd and silly that you find out that the real truth is better than the lies that made you love it in the first place.
That seemed ideal. Start with something you love and honestly let it lead you everywhere.
I was resolutely convinced of that by at least the end of 1993. I told almost everyone I could find that and actually pissed some people off. I told it to two teachers at a debate tournament and one said, “If I hear one more person tell me that I have to make learning fun…”
Learning should be fun, but I never said that. What I said was start with something people love and you can lead them anywhere after that. I should have phrased it perfectly and put it on a T-Shirt and made some money, because I still think that it is true.
I had however forgotten how much I had learned from books and things that I hated, and how much I had learned from hating Donald Trump and “his book.”
So oddly on this day with this person I never agreed with on anything, he was intent to take joy in the fact that I was so depressed that the guy I hated so much had become president. He didn’t even like Trump, he just hated other people worse, and was happy to see me sad.
Usually, we were so diametrically opposed that I would either sabotage the argument with insults or just pretend like there was no good answer to things I definitely thought had good answers. It was the very definition of ambivalence.
