You can listen to the audio version of this here. (It’s just me reading it.)
The first real-life friend I lost to “politics” was after the Gabby Giffords shooting. It wasn’t someone whom I disagreed with politically. It was someone who saw it all as a game.
We met at the Jewish Community Center in our little village in the suburbs south of Chicago. Our kids went to preschool together.
My friend grew up Catholic, on the South Side, and married a Jewish man. She was blonde and brassy, smart and hilarious. And rich as fuck since her husband got his MBA and took over the family business.
I was struggling to make ends meet. And failing.
In 2007, my 14-year not-legally-married marriage ended. She got the stocks. I got the house and the kids.
By the end of 2008, my house was worth less than I owed. Partly because of the financial crisis. Partly because I had taken a second mortgage to pay off a business debt. I had given my word. I keep my word.
Sometimes I regret that I am the type of person who keeps my word.
Really, though, it wasn’t the financial crisis, but social media that killed the business.
In the early ‘90s I started a newspaper that covered the theatre and film industries in Chicago. It quickly became the bible for performing arts professionals. We even published a book series, which we just called The Book, as a catchy way to riff off that reputation.
The newspaper was named PerformInk, which was also a catchy riff off what we did. Though many people spelled it wrong when they subscribed, we got a lot of subscribers, and had a solid and steady advertising base.
In July of 2007, Facebook opened up to the general public, not just college students. By 2009, PerformInk stopped printing.
These are not unrelated events, though I didn’t realize that at the time, when I was paying off my printer. I was just treading water. Hard. Facebook had an algorithm that allowed my advertisers to pinpoint exactly who they wanted to target, for pennies on the dollar that we were charging.
Moreover, Google became the dominant search engine. And the whole nature of marketing changed. Not only did location not matter anymore, but the catchy name that made you stand out, which had been a staple of business marketing - think KODAK - suddenly became a liability. People googled “acting in Chicago” or “theatre in Chicago,” not “PerformInk.”
This affected my advertisers, too. There were about four prominent acting schools in Chicago. And Second City and ImprovOlympic (which changed its name to IO after they got sued by the Olympic committee) did improv and sketch comedy classes. Here and there, people would open a studio or start classes as a side business to their theatre. They all advertised in PerformInk.
But Google’s algorithm not only favored descriptive rather than catchy names, it also favored websites that had more links directed to it. If all you did for two decades was teach acting classes, then there might not be many links to your site. But Second City was a world-renowned theatre venue. And it was run by smart people who looked at the searches that drove people to their site and thought, “We should teach acting classes in addition to sketchwriting and improv.”
Within three years every major acting school but one outside of Second City closed. The one that was left? It had “acting” and “Chicago” in its name.
Hilarity Ensues
When the crash happened, my friend’s MBA husband panicked. I had posted something satirically criticizing the fact that Wall Street was being bailed out, and he shot me a castigating email, telling me that this was serious, that nobody could get credit, and businesses like his could lose everything.
The short version of what he was talking about is that businesses all over the globe borrow from banks on a daily basis to cover cash flow. Then they pay that loan back the next day. It creates a chain of business-to-bank-to-business transactions that could not work if one link in the chain didn’t pay back its daily loan. That link was Lehman Brothers. In the fall of 2008, U.S. political leaders and the Federal Reserve were focused on one thing and one thing only: repairing the broken link in the credit market so the entire economic chain wouldn’t fall apart.
They couldn’t see that for many of us, it already had.
By that time, my friend and her husband and children had left the south suburbs, and moved north to Highland Park. We only really connected by Facebook and the occasional text. The rare times we saw each other, we usually had good-natured arguments about politics, though they niggled at me. This was when Obama was pushing his health care bill, and she was vehemently opposed. While I was exploring the options for Illinois Medicaid because my business was failing and my children were growing, she was living in a palatial house funded by a company that was a lucrative part of the healthcare system. Increasingly what I felt, when we argued, was dismissed.
My Facebook connection to her presaged to me what was coming in our world. My friend had a friend from Catholic school who was MAGA before Trump coined the phrase. One of their other old schoolmates and I sort of bonded over our dismay at this woman - and at our friend who refused to do anything about her.
My friend thought our arguments with the pre-MAGA woman were hilarious. She dismissed our concerns about her friend’s overt racism, and general nastiness.
Then on January 8, 2011, Gabby Giffords was shot. Six people were killed. One of them was a 10-year-old girl.
My kids were 9. They were with their other mom that weekend, and I panicked. I wanted to go swoop them up. I posted about it on Facebook, noting that the tenor of the times - which Giffords had talked about - and the easy availability of guns needed to change.
My friend slid up on my post and told me this wasn’t a time to “argue politics.”
I have not been in contact with her since.
We’re All In This Together
In the ensuing years, we have been through Sandy Hook, Eliot Rogers’ incel manifesto, the AME Baptist Church in Charleston, Umpqua Community College in Oregon, the Washington Navy Yard, the Pulse Nightclub, Las Vegas - WHICH I COVERED - Sutherland Springs, Parkland, El Paso, Buffalo, Uvalde, and Allen. Now Lewiston. And too many others to name.
On July 4, 2022, I wanted to contact my friend again, to see if she was at the Highland Park parade. I wanted to know that she and her family were safe. But I also sort of wanted to know if it was still just politics to her. If her old MAGA friends were still funny to her. If this was all just one big joke.
In the end, I let it go. It didn’t matter, really. Not now. That train has left the station. Now there are two mass shootings every day in the U.S., and countless shootings with less than four fatalities that aren’t in that tally. The news media doesn’t really report mass shootings unless the fatalities hit double digits.
Today there are more guns in the U.S. than there are people. And a disproportionate minority - that, since the January 6 insurrection, we know includes former and active military and police officers - own most of the guns.
After Lewiston this week, Maine Democratic Congressman Jared Golden - who has an A+ rating from gun rights groups - announced that he would change his stance and vote to ban assault weapons. That, of course, is not likely with the new Republican speaker, who, the very day of the shooting, gave what sounded a lot like a sermon in the House of Representatives.
The saddest part of this week has been listening to all the Maine officials - the keepers of lax gun laws - saying they didn’t think it could happen in their state. It couldn’t happen to them.
Somehow, I guess, folks in Maine thought they were immune to this disease of gun violence that the rest of us have experienced.
This makes my heart heavy. It has to happen to us in order for us to want to do the right thing for everybody.
It’s a lack of empathy. It’s a lack of humanity that we have been taught is part of our American identity. Not “we’re all in this together,” but “you must have done something wrong to deserve your fate.”
On March 24, 1998, a pit lodged itself in my consciousness. And since then, it’s grown so big it hurts. That was the day that 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson pulled the fire alarm at their middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, went into the woods outside the school, and took target practice at the girls who came outside. Four of them, and a female teacher, were murdered.
The guns came from the Golden family’s personal arsenal.
This was the first mass shooting in the modern era. And the culture in which it happened looked a lot like the culture surrounding rural, and small-town Maine.
But it couldn’t happen to them. Of course not. Until, of course, it does. And every time, people are surprised.
We are at war. But, it seems, too many people would rather ignore it. This makes all of us sitting ducks.
How hilarious is that?
Laugh. Cry. Think.
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