I have time to kill after my visit to North Carolina for a memorial
I'm writing this from RDU airport. It's about 8:30pm and my flight was supposed to leave at about 7:30. Delayed until after 11pm.
Not really the airline's fault. This time. As much as I despise air travel, Boston is a sheet of ice several inches thick.
The reason I've endured the unpleasantness of 2 hours in coach in the first place is that a friend of ours (Sarah, myself and the kids) passed away a few months ago. P. had little remaining family and friends from the many of the phases of her life, but the science crew from her time in San Diego and the extension of that through Chapel Hill and, later, the Boston area, were unwilling to let her pass un-celebrated.
In a lot of ways it was a low end memorial. The core crew reserved a table at the Carolina Brewery on Franklin St. in Chapel Hill and contacted a bunch of people about getting together, accepting anyone that could make the time. We (not me, but you know what I mean) got photos together, made a slide show, photo poster, and memorial card. However, and I know this as much as I know that the live version of Miami 2017 is one of Billy Joel's best songs, there is no doubt that she would have loved us meeting there for her.
People showed up from Chapel Hill, the Boston area, and South Carolina to honor the unbelievably sweet person that P. was. We set aside the deeply sad reasons she passed and honored the lasting joy that she brought to so many of us.
Also got in touch with A. and M., two of our best friends from graduate school. M. was a tech in the same Pharmacology lab my wife was in and A. joined the program not long after S. and I got together. Those early stories are hilarious and if I ever have to monetize this I will totally exploit that,
M. has been a movement conservative the whole time I've known him and can serve up a stack of conservative talking points at any time. He grew up in the 60s and 70s and his father was military, and there have been a lot of stories about the kind of semi-arbitrary behavior rules that you'd expect in that environment. Despite the fact that he is a state government employee currently enjoying a government pension that none of the rest of us have, his wife works for the EPA, his daughter works for the FDA, "government" is still bad.
Regardless, M. has been a friend to everyone willing to be a friend to him. We have an open invitation to stay at their home any time and I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones. I'm quite certain that we could stay with them for months after the first stages of the zombie apocalypse hit Boston. "Aaron's growling is so funny. Must be part of one of his long running jokes. He almost crosses the line, but then seems to make his way back in a controllably blood thirsty way."
We had kind of a big confrontation the other night. We are all in science and are all vulnerable to what's going on right now. Me (and my wife), his wife, his daughter, our friend at the CDC, and our friend couple that have a key breadwinner in a professorship at BU all felt that the arbitrary DOGE boy cuts were tragi-comically stupid but potentially life changing for us. We kinda ganged up on him.
Several folks left and he and I decided to have a bourbon or two. We talked about all the other things that we usually talk about. Mike is a good guy and he's had to set aside a lot of arbitrary "principles" to maintain friendships with us liberals and lesbians.
In a way, not unlike NYT editors, I wish M. could have come up with a good counter argument for what we were feeling about the current situation. Like so many Democrats that wish there was a legit Republican justification for what they were doing, I would not have been sad at a solid counter argument. Unfortunately, it was the same thing you would have gotten from Truth Social; nothing of substance. The last thing we talked about before we killed the conversation was his complaint about student loan forgiveness. Republicans generally have no real justification for what they are doing.
Good conservatives are in a bad place and it saddens me every day. There are a lot of conservatives that I love and the things they claim to care about are unassailably great. What love they have for themselves and their neighbors has been hijacked for the oldest, saddest goal of power and money and I hate it every day.
Imagine selling the watch that has been passed down for generations in your family for $30, or selling the savior of humanity for 30 pieces of silver. This is what conservatives are doing right now.
