Edith

a person i know

So there’s this person out there: her name is Edith. (Her name is not Edith.) Edith is my great-aunt; she married my grandfather’s brother a long time ago. I believe I have met Edith in person once, when I was about eight years old.

Once upon a time, there came a day when Facebook opened its doors to everyone, not just horny college students. On that day, everybody’s mom joined Facebook. A few days after that, everybody’s grandma joined Facebook. Somewhere around this timeframe, Edith joined Facebook, and one of us added the other as a “friend.” I have historically had a philosophy of adding everyone I’ve ever met as friends on Facebook, a policy that I have repeatedly had reason to regret.

There was a time when I yelled a lot on Facebook about politics. This is because I was in my late twenties, in law school, and angry. Worst of all, I had convinced myself that people cared what I thought about these things. The mid-aughts were a good time to yell on the Internet if you were even vaguely eloquent; it could get you a lot of attention and glowing praise. At least once, I, sir, won the Internet.

But Edith did not like the things I said on Facebook, because the things I said were mean about Donald Trump. Edith did not, originally, like Donald Trump, but in the years since 2015 she became fully inducted into the cult. Every few years she would out of nowhere send me a link to a video hosted on some website I’ve never heard of, which video consists of two hours of sweaty bald men and hawklike blonde women bloviating about the deep state and the very real and very concerning problems with the 2020 election.

The pattern was this: Trump would do something awful, like encourage the Charlottesville rioters, or threaten to revoke citizenship for flag-burners, or whatever, pick one of your favorites, and I’d complain about it on Facebook, adopting a posture of aspirationally erudite righteous anger. Some people would “like” this, and then Edith would come along and yell at me. Usually she would not defend whatever thing I was mad about, but would instead talk about all the various ways Democrats are worse. I tried to reason with Edith, but never seemed to get through to her. It was like arguing with an empty carousel; there was a lot of noise and motion and flashing lights, but we didn’t seem to get anywhere. Whether this is because I was being patronizing or because she was being irrational is impossible to say. (Probably it was both.)

Some time around 2021 I told her I didn’t want to talk to her about politics any more, and in my attempt to put my foot down, I erred on the side of being rude rather than unclear. It seemed to mostly work.

I still occasionally yell about politics on Facebook, but it’s only a few times a year, now, instead of a few times a week. I could say that this decrease is because I have grown out of this phase; I could say it is because I’m tired. It feels like angry political yelling gets fewer eyeballs than it used to on Facebook, anyway. Perhaps this reflects algorithmic changes, perhaps this reflects less traffic on Facebook. Or perhaps people became tired of my yelling; there are only so many ways one can say “Orange Man Bad” before it just becomes noise, after all. Another way of saying this is that I don’t yell about politics on Facebook as often as I used to because I don’t get as much attention anymore; make of that what you will.

But Edith, stalwart and unflinching, still prowls Facebook, and of late she has forgotten that I don’t want to talk about politics with her. So the other day I said that I do not like the President of the United States kidnapping a foreign head of state without even talking to Congress about it first, and Edith logged on to remind me of the evils of drug trafficking and to ask if I still believe the “Russia Hoax.” I was very annoyed, but a part of me was also delighted. At this point this is a longstanding relationship. I have been fighting with Edith on Facebook longer than I’ve known my wife. “Edith,” in my mind, has become a synecdoche for all the most frustrating members of the Orange Cult. “Yes,” I ask myself, “This is a good idea; but how will Edith feel about it?” The specter of Edith haunts my every post on that cursed Book of Faces.

About a year ago, my grandmother got hurt. Grandpa can’t help with these things as much as he used to, because he’s increasingly scatterbrained due to a series of relatively small strokes. (As such things go, he’s doing fine, but you can’t leave him alone with anything. This is very sad, but he’s 98. If I don’t get my act together soon, then when I’m 98 I will have been dead for about 40 years.) Edith came to see my grandparents; I can’t remember if she was already there and this was all a lucky coincidence, or if she flew down specifically to help. Regardless, it was a long journey separated by well more than a thousand miles, and Edith, I am told, was essential in keeping the wheels on the bus. The word my mother used was “superhero.”

“My political enemies are real people who are sometimes nice, at least in some aspects of their lives” is a trite observation, though like a lot of trite observations, it’s important not to forget it. We must remember that our enemies are people, too, full of complexity and frailty, unexpected virtues and unexpected vices. But it’s also important not to forget that, even so, they are still our political enemies. The command, after all, is “love your enemies,” not “don’t have enemies.” My great-aunt Edith did a kind thing for my grandmother; it is but one achievement in what I understand to be a lifetime habit of being kind and reliable to the folks around her. Also, if my great-aunt Edith has her way, our nation will be cast into a hellish pit of cruelty from which it may never recover.