Friends are Tough to Come By, Easy to Lose

By ART CULLEN

Dad always told me to value the friends you have, because they are few and time is short. I’m to the age (64) where reading the obituaries is alarming and profound. We need to keep the friends who are still kicking.

Politics is chipping away at those friendships. My cohort of grumpy old men has been eroded by the debate. We used to talk about fishing, guns and Ray Wylie Hubbard. More recently the squall has concerned vaccines, lying liars and who’s the fool. Then one of them says to hell with it and leaves. Goes to show you should steer clear of politics and religion around the cracker barrel.

These boys have been thick since they were turning over rocks looking for crawdads, on through rocking at the Cobb. Nowadays they’re sputtering at each other.

A guy I’ve known and admired since Little League posted on my Facebook page that the “mainstream media,” whatever that is, has always been our enemy. I don’t know how to interpret that or approach it other than to say that the enemy is hard to define, but he comes cloaked in distortion and is a master of trickery by deceit.

We want clean air and water, all of us. We want prosperous farms and healthy Main Streets. We want honest government, and we would just as soon be left alone. Not that much divides us, honestly.

When you get to be a man about our age, you figure out that the wife and kids quit listening to you awhile ago about certain things. You can hope that your buddies will hear you if you speak a little louder. Somebody should turn up Ray Wylie Hubbard and spell out “redneck mother.” We should laugh about how deaf we are. And we should laugh at what old codgers we have become. That would help.

Friends and friendships change. Time moves on. You lose track or just change course. Some are maintained despite the decades. Storm Lake native Ab Tymeson used to email me his essays on economics with sort of a libertarian bent. I didn’t necessarily agree with Ab but he had a sharp mind and a sweet spirit that would fill you up in his presence. He recently died of cancer, just a year older than me. It got me thinking about how the relentless messaging doesn’t have to be allowed to break long bonds.

It shouldn’t take a funeral to bring us together.

But here we are. A pal is having some health issues. Another has a bad cough. You don’t know. I’ve been smoking with Guy Colvin since we were stealing them from our dads. Either one of us could drop momentarily. Perish the thought, but …

These good times don’t just roll on forever.

But it’s the worst time since the Vietnam War, friend against friend, families taking care about what buttons they might push with Uncle Earl at the gay wedding.

The core of the problem appears to be facts. What is mainstream to one is a stream of lies to another. All the empirical evidence says that vaccines are safe and effective, and that Joe Biden won the election, and that burning fossil fuels is leading to environmental catastrophe. Otherwise reasonable people are separating from each other over these facts. And we don’t quite know how to resolve it.

You start by knowing who your friends are. You try to keep them close by biting your lip and wishing them good health, if you get the chance. It might be at Fratzke and Jensen Funeral Home. Put that witty rejoinder in your back pocket, lest you be called deplorable.

Second, if it sounds so simple it probably isn’t. AM radio is not designed for nuance. They call them shock jocks for a reason. Consider a diverse set of information sources. Read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Don’t set your sail by Fox News. Be leery of MSNBC. If the Middle East blows up, tune in to CNN. Otherwise, go back to Big Ten basketball. An agronomist on Twitter is not always a philosopher or opera critic.

I’m not the enemy of my friend. I would like to say that I don’t care. But I do. I am losing enough friends naturally. I don’t need help from propagandists methodically setting us asunder by algorithm. What we do need is a gatekeeper who can ferret and vet the facts, and keep the debate within loose bounds. That is what The Storm Lake Times does. Honest. I would not lie to you. You are my friend, after all, and I can’t afford to lose another. I hear a New Orleans brass band coming up the street.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, will appear Nov. 15 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2021

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