Today I had my heart broken. I have been participating for over a year in an online community of disgruntled Mormons. After a while, even disgruntled people get tired of talking about the disgruntling stuff and like to talk about other things. It makes us think we're multi-dimensional. In any case, a year is a long time in a community, and I had started to feel like many of these people were real friends.

Well, it turns out I was wrong, at least about one of them. When reading some political ideas with which he disagreed, he turned into a real asshole, spewing forth the sort of right-wing polemical crap that seems to characterize what passes for political discourse here in the U.S. - that is, that anybody who disagrees with the current policies of the Bush Administration is unpatriotic and unAmerican. And then they wrap themselves in the flag and sing Praise to the Man Who Communed with Jehovah...except they mean George, not Joe.

My interactions with people are about relationships, not ideas. I guess that makes me shallow, or an extrovert, or whatever. But I think the person who I had THOUGHT was a friend really wasn't. Else, he wouldn't have called me unAmerican and unpatriotic. See, a major failure of polemicists is that they forget that their insults are directed at humans with feelings. Not just at the abstract unknowns Janeane Garafalo or Michael Moore or Al Franken, but also at the woman who spent several hours reading and writing e-mails when the marriage was on the verge of tanking, and actually thought that meant the person on the other end was a friend.

Now I know better.