What is wrong with people that they can allow something like political perspective to allow them to potentially damage relationships? A specific topic that a person might be passionate about, abortion for example, okay, I can see that being important enough. But something as simple as a label? A title?
It's very frustrating to have struggled through so many of life's difficult challenges, to have fought your way through medical expenses, over-taxation, struggled with paying bills and balancing debt for YEARS to get to a place where you can barely secure a mortgage loan. Spending years wearing the same clothes and shoes you've had for 10+ years because your kids need $100+ in school supplies every year and you can't do both. To have to determine how much of your electric bill you can pay this month and still be able to afford enough groceries to get through the next 2 weeks.
How you lived as a child and these struggles that you do (or don't) live through as an adult, play an enormous role in where you stand on many of the issues in politics for the rest of your life.
Today, someone very close to me, someone who I love and have a great deal of tolerance for, attacked my opinions again. He's done it before, and because he's a young man, with basically no life experience, I've managed to excuse his attacks as an equal mix of arrogance and ignorance. Much like many of my other friends, I've had enough respect for the relationship, to simply let it go, ignore it. Today, he didn't just attack my political opinions, he attacked me as a person.
I don't know why it hurt my feelings the way that it did, but I've considered that it shouldn't, and determined that the reason I think it did was because I care so much about this person, that his opinion that I am a "bad person" really matters to me. More so than I think some people can understand. I strive to be a good person. I care for each of my children with all of my attention. I am there for each of my friends and family anytime and everytime. I volunteer hours upon hours to the Girl Scouts of America. I offer help to people that I barely know, and sometimes, people I don't know at all. I do everything that I can for other people because I can, not for any other reason. I don't take anything in return, and I don't call on people to return the favor.
I am a good person. If you disagree, than you aren't my friend and you don't deserve that title.
