I feel there is very little we can do individually to change people’s minds or turn them away from fascism, or even to get them to stop turning their own brains into soup, but you can still show them there are consequences to their actions.
Telling my own friends / relations what I think of them and cutting ties with them has done nothing to bring them back in line with normal human values, but at least I am not burdened with the guilt of my association, and maybe one day enough people will cut them off that the loneliness gets to them and they begin to re-evaluate their lives.
It is literally the least I can do. Any sadness I felt was heartbreak that they could be so shitty to begin with.
No, that’s wrong and selfish.
You have a much better chance of leaving a good impression on people when you interact with them more often as opposed to less, and you said yourself leaving doesn’t change their minds but it makes you feel better.
If you cared most about changing minds you’d spend more time with them, not less. Furthermore, spending time shoveling the neighbors walkway, giving drunk friends a ride or helping your parents clean out their basement improves these people’s quality of life.
Counterpoint, some people are fucking awful and don’t deserve your pity.
That’s true, but I’m only responding to what the op wrote.
A counter example to what I said is several friends I have who’ve cut off family after being kicked out or cut off for coming out or had conversion therapy pushed on them. Results of cutting off family in those circumstances seem to be overwhelmingly positive, and stem from a perception and understanding of family and that family’s actions that are opposed to the ops post.
What underlies cutting off family in those circumstances is recognition that all parties see the family as a real material benefit and that the families actions are motivated by a warped, distorted sense of “tough love”.
Cutting off works in this case because time takes the toughness out and allows it to become simply love. Friends are not like family in this way. Over time we will get wistful about old friends but may never contact them again, but the familial bond has a longer and stronger connection by both association and the states reification. everybody wants to be a family again. There’s a table to sit down and negotiate at and even the most rabid evangelicals see having no child as more abhorrent than an aberrant one.
Of course, like I said, the op isn’t saying that at all. Their post boils down to:
That last part is really accurate and telling. Rather than establishing a clear line to normalize relations and communicate it clearly, the op just stopped. What they describe isn’t a noble, principled stand to protect themselves and create a better future for their friends and family out of love, it’s an act of despair.
While I understand despair, I’m not gonna cheer it on.
I’m going to clarify that my POC wife is absolutely better off knowing that I am not associating with these people, and learning what they had become or covertly always were really like was many things, devastating, humiliating, embarrassing. The least I can do is cut them off and tell them why. What I would like to do is ruin their lives brutally.
Of course, that’s a lot different.
I read your post and only considered it in the context on one person cutting ties with people who they decided couldn’t change.
What worries me about that misinterpreted scenario is that often times despite not wanting to be reliant on those people, they represent a real support network. There are real ways to improve conditions by withholding yourself from relationships you want to keep and improve, that’s how a strike works after all, but I worried in my misunderstanding of your post that someone could do real harm to their ability to weather all kinds of circumstances by cutting people out without a path back in.
Of course that’s not you.
I hope things improve with the assholes in your life.
Counterpoint: Although it’s been hard I’ve lived a far happier life after cutting off my transphobic family
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Those are my own often fraught relationships with my insane destructive neighbor, self destructive alcoholic friend, and parents.
I chose not to describe abuse because the point of my comment there was that doing those things helps the people around me out.