Grief Without Death
Changing Friends in a Changing World
I have always been comfortable with the idea of death. For years, death has been more fascinating than eerie. More inviting than abysmal. Death, to me, is the only universal experience. We all do it; we are naturals at it. It requires no skill, no experience, no grace, and no talent. I grieve as all people do. When my grandfather passed, a centenarian patriarch whose compassion extends to a family of 200-plus cousins, I shed tears, of course. But I mostly felt relief that a life well lived can now rest.
There’s lots of joy that can be squeezed from our sadness.
The five stages of grief often pass quickly for me. When someone’s life ends and their body passes, denial and bargaining are barely part of the process. I teeter between anger, sadness, and acceptance. That experience flipped on its head as I mourned someone still alive.
There are deaths that can occur outside of the body.
We all have a Trump-supporting uncle. Some of us have friends who support Trump. Oftentimes, they were annoying before Trump. Their allegiance to Donald serves as neither a shock or an interesting development, because to be contrarian is consistent with their character.
When I was 15 years old, years before Trump entered the political arena, I had an uncle crudely joke at the dinner table about masturbation with my grandfather present. No one laughed. It is no surprise to me he finds a savior in a man like Donald Trump. No grief or sympathy there; slight amusement at the predictability, slight disappointment at…the predictability.
Where it his different is when Trump’s allure extends to people I consider compassionate, kind, loving, and talented, who I had a deep love and admiration for.
One of my closest friends from college supports Trump and I grieved him harder than my grandfather. For the most formative years of my life, we spent every day roasting each other, getting excited over Marvel movies, and obsessing over concert footage. When I found out he supported Trump, it broke my worldview.
Everything Trump represented to me is an affront to My Friend’s character. Every time I asked him about it, our friendship felt like it withered a bit.
Now we remain in contact, three to four months in between each interaction. There may be a ‘happy birthday,’ a friendly nod to a comic book movie, but most often these days, a disagreement on something political I’ve posted. In every conversation, the love remains. But there is an underlying current of awareness that things will never be the same.
Who we extend compassion to has changed too much these days.
The recurring theme of our disagreement is the lens of extremity we apply to Trump’s actions. I see Trump as unambiguously fascist. My Friend sees him as a necessary shake-up to the status quo: imperfect but driven to a better USA. His view is based in truth, but that truth is emotional and not objective.
So many Trump supporters were drawn in by a vision of economic relief. These people are in legitimate and dire need of an economic plan that serves them. Trump, a clever marketer, successfully sold them on his vision. His rhetoric delivers where his policy does not. However, his rhetoric prevails.
The moment that really split us was over a stranger. Someone who never laughed or broke bread with My Friend but has become more trusted than me. Before Charlie Kirk died, I posted a spirited criticism.
My Friend reached out to me. He said I was too extreme, that my critique was counterproductive, effectively undermining all of my messaging. In particular my reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death drove a stake in our relationship. I had no compassion for Kirk when he died. My Friend told me even if I hated Charlie Kirk, I should pray for him to be better. When I told him I had no interest in that, he told me I was full of pure hatred. I wondered what he thought Charlie was doing.
At one point, out of pure curiosity, just in case there was something I was missing about Charlie Kirk, I copy pasted a bunch of Charlie Kirk quotes into Chat GPT and Grok but removed his name from them, and I added the prompt, “Describe the character of someone who says these things.” Chat GPT said, “This person is an authoritarian Christian nationalist with racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, Islamophobic, and anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs—someone who frames cruelty as honesty and hierarchy as divine order.” Grok succinctly added “A klansmen with a ring light.”
I attempted to explain to My Friend why I hated Kirk so much. In an impassioned Instagram DM voice note I said:
“Donald Trump cut the federal funding in Texas for them to be able to predict accurate weather patterns. And when he did that, a flood happened in Texas. And 20 people died. Hundreds of people were displaced. Now the ability was there before the Trump administration for those people to get to safety! They did not have to die. And do you know what Charlie Kirk did? He got on television and he said, we need to talk about how DEI killed those people. I find that deplorable. I find it disgusting. I think he’s a fascist. I think he’s a Nazi. And if you don’t believe he’s a fascist and a Nazi, cool! But if you had someone, who was a fascist and a Nazi? How should I mourn them?”
He continued to say my critique was too extreme. He told me I was too caught up in politics, and that I care too much.
So I steered the conversation into Trump’s flagrant disregard for free speech and his illegal treatment of migrants. If he doesn’t extend due process to the immigrants of our country, what happens when he makes the historically consistent leap to Black people?
My Friend responded “Trump is not coming for Black men. He was already president. He would’ve done it already. I just think you’re too caught up in this politics stuff, man.”
It clicked for me here how different our lenses are for this. Because fascism does not declare itself with a parade (even though Donald Trump does).
Fascism operates as a parasite, often microscopic, feeding on democracy until the world you know is completely hollowed out.
We can’t keep looking for something overt like Trump saying “Black men should be slaves.” But the way white supremacy and fascism usually work now is through policy design and coded language.
Trump supported gerrymandering in Texas that functionally makes a white vote count three times more than a Black vote.
We have the data to know that most adolescent crime happens between 3:30 and 4:30 pm, when students are fresh out of school. After-school programs are a successful deterrent to this. Cutting after-school programs — like Betsy Devos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, did — increases crime risk in Black communities. This justifies more policing and incarceration.
And we know that felons are not allowed to vote. That means governmental entities can use them for labor without pay, or for minimal pay like the firefighters in Los Angeles being paid 10 cents an hour for risking their lives just a few months ago.
None of that says “Black men should be slaves” on paper, but the outcome is the same. That’s why I call it white supremacy and fascism.
I have so many thoughts on why my arguments didn’t get anywhere with him. My Friend will not see it the way I see it, largely because Trump has brainwashed people through a meticulous misinformation campaign. Facts will not penetrate ideology.
“Ignorance is not the absence of fact but the presence of myth.” - Yamila Hussein, (Ed. D, Harvard University
My Friend has often said to me when we go back and forth about the country, “You need to listen to different sources.” So I asked him for some. He recommended Brandon Tatum, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson.
I watched a full Brandon Tatum video to understand. I found this Anglo-Saxon Negro so infuriating that I wrote this letter to his website.
“I really have not seen a more succinct and incredible example of someone who is a coon before. You really have exceeded the bar. Let me be clear, your content is intellectually dishonest, and I’m sure you’re aware of that. You’re a liar, a grifter, and you have no integrity and frankly no God besides capitalism. The only way your content works is to use half truths to paint a dishonest representation of the facts and I have to admit you’re talented at it. If you hold any of your content up to 5 minutes of intellectual scrutiny it falls apart and I’d be happy to write an essay on ANY of your videos to prove it but only if you can honestly engage back. I know you won’t because then your grift and illusions will no longer work. What a disappointing negro monkey you are. Continue dancing for your masters, I hope you find a way back to integrity.”
My Friend and I will most likely never see things the same way. I don’t blame him for this at all. His entire media and information machine is built on manipulation and exploitation. I blame the liars, grifters, and those who sow seeds of distrust.
If we zoom out, I blame capitalism for eroding our school systems and not equipping so many people to fully critically interrogate the issues of today. But that essay is for another day.
Facts cannot penetrate ideology, but maybe me being witness to them can be a ring buoy to someone processing the same things I am.
I needed a common language for what I was seeing. In 2003, Lawrence W. Britt authored “Fascism, Anyone?” Free Inquiry describes the article as “the most reprinted — and most pirated — article in the magazine’s history.” It identifies the 14 consistent characteristics of fascism in historical regimes.
Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
Disdain for the importance of human rights
Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
Rampant sexism
A controlled mass media
Obsession with national security
Religion and ruling elite tied together
Power of corporations protected
Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
Obsession with crime and punishment
Rampant cronyism and corruption
Fraudulent elections
On each point, policy is doing the work. If we accept this framing then it is unambiguous that we live in a fascist country. We are now 14/14.
This bi-weekly essay series will interpret how each of Britt’s line items relates to our country. This will be explorations of history, rhetoric, policy, and of course, Donald Trump. I don’t expect that I will change minds, but I can be a witness to the world I occupy so that when this moment has passed, the world is better off. By laying out this analysis, when we discuss the US and fascism with a retrospective lens, no one has the option of saying “I couldn’t see it.”
Fascism, in practice, is not a costume change.
It is a policy cadence: redraw the district; thin the program; widen the discretion; criminalize the inconvenience; monetize the punishment; disenfranchise the punished; lease their labor. Nothing in that sequence says “slavery” aloud. The outcome does.
I grieve this friendship more than I grieved my grandfather. Because the death I am comfortable with — physical death — is so much easier to understand than this.
This grief can be negotiated with. Death cannot.
But that won’t stop me from attempting to understand it.
Since Trump’s second election, I have maintained the belief that we need to extend compassion to his supporters. I think so many of them are well-meaning people who were sold a lie.
Newsmax, Fox News, Breitbart, and Trump’s media machine are drowning vulnerable people in misinformation, and salvation won’t come from alienating those people. Salvation will come, as the Black Panthers so readily exemplified, when we reach across the aisle, calmly and compassionately illustrate how the actions of this administration seeks to harm us all, and present a better unified path towards a better world for all.
The right thing to do is often the most exhausting.
To My Friend: I grieve. I love you, have always loved you, and will always love you. If something brings you back to the person I knew, you will always have a compassionate place to return to.
This essay series is dedicated to you.