Stifle Yourself

By TAD BARTIMUS

If politics makes strange bedfellows, war makes for strained friendships.

An old schoolmate has been my best pal since we were 14. He's been there for every momentous occasion and countless forgotten ones that, when added up, make a life. In four decades, I can't recall a single cross word exchanged between us.

But now we are giving each other a wide berth, as wide as the chasm separating our opinions about America's invasion of Iraq.

My friend thinks I'm an unpatriotic ignoramus because I adamantly oppose unilateral action by the United States. I think he's a knee-jerk jingoist because he enthusiastically supports the military effort to oust Saddam Hussein.

This is dangerous ground for old friends to tread. But it's one many people I know now find themselves on.

So far, our disagreement has been confined to e-mails: an angry rebuke from him, a carefully worded one-sentence rebuttal from me. No letters or phone calls have been exchanged. It's as if we sense that our disappointment and impatience with each other's views could cause us to lose something precious if we escalate our argument.

Through Vietnam, Grenada, Bosnia and the Gulf War, we avoided pinning labels on one another. I knew he was a businessman and a lawyer; he knew I was a journalist. We guessed each other's presidential preferences, but never debated our different candidates' merits. Living thousands of miles apart, our sporadic, in-depth conversations centered on family, ambitions and disappointments. Instinctively, we shunned politics and personal philosophies.

E-mail, however, afforded us opportunities to throw the occasional zinger at one another without having to make any comment about it. He sent derogatory letters about "Hanoi Jane" Fonda; I forwarded columns written by The New York Times' acerbic commentator Maureen Dowd. He compiled gossip about President Bill Clinton's peccadilloes and I delighted in mailing off Enron scandal clips. We were oil and water, point and counterpoint, but it all seemed light-hearted good fun -- that is, until President George W. Bush said, "Let's go."

Since then, our relationship has shifted. We are at an emotional impasse, and if we want to stay friends we'll have to keep our most profound beliefs to ourselves.

When I was younger this would have seemed an intolerable restriction. "Familiarity breeds contempt," my grandmother used to warn me. "Why?" I'd ask her. "You'll see," she'd answer enigmatically.

Now I do. To learn too much about another person is to risk losing respect for them. Without respect, there can be no friendship. Without old, deep friendships, like the sort I have with my best pal, nobody would know where we came from or how we got here.

My mistake was in trying to explain myself to him. In all these years he's known who I am, and he chose to ignore the parts he didn't like. My questioning of the Bush administration's unilateral pre-emptive doctrine reminded him.

To save this precious friendship, I must -- to paraphrase the immortal words of Archie Bunker -- "stifle myself." It won't be easy. I won't like it. But some battles are worth losing. This war already has destroyed too many things. I don't want my best friendship to become another casualty.

© 2003 The Women Syndicate

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