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I don't blame you for this mistake (for lack of a better term), because I didn't notice it until the second time I read your post, but I think our tendency to allow the present to inform out perceptions of the past can lead us toward explanations that don't make sense. At no point in 2015 was any of the smart money convinced that Trump was a viable political candidate. The perception of him before the 2016 primaries was that he was an unserious candidate who tapped into the resentments of a certain kind of person who typically didn't vote. Given the amount of vitriol he received from pretty much everyone in the Republican establishment and his questionable standing among Evangelical Christians, it was assumed that he was good at getting headlines and winning in too-early-to matter polls but as soon as the people who actually mattered started paying attention his standing would drop like a rock.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump, or the culture war in general. By the time Trump announced his candidacy, her marriage was pretty much over, she was making intimate details of her relationship with her husband semi-public, and she was burning bridges in her social circle—I'm hesitant to conclude that gay marriage disagreements had anything to do with that; if she was oversharing with people such as yourself who barely knew her, you can only imagine what she was telling people from church.
I had a friend in college who grew up relatively poor in a wealthy suburb. He always had this outside fixation on status and success. He majored in business, and read books by Donald Trump and other motivational people that he took literally as business advice. He wanted to go to law school and be a sports agent, and he interned with a sports agency and got to meet Barry Sanders. But his obsession was entirely superficial. For example, he'd read in his popular business books about the importance of budgeting time, so he'd block off time in the evenings to do homework and study. But this consisted of him watching television with a book open, which he'd close at 9pm or whatever and say that he'd already done his studying for the night and was keeping on schedule. When I told him I didn't much like scotch, he told me I should develop a taste for it because that's what the big dogs drank. When his aging Volvo got totaled after a drunk driver rear-ended him at a traffic light, he started test driving cars like the Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer Edition (new, of course) rather than buy whatever the insurance payout would get him.
At some point he got the idea that taking prescription opiates recreationally was a high-status thing to do. When he first mentioned that he liked painkillers, I thought maybe he was just finding a silver lining in dental work or something. When he started talking about it more, I tried to disabuse him of the notion that it was cool by noting its nickname of "hillbilly heroin" and pointing to a bust in West Virginia that had been on the news. He assured me, though, that top businessmen and all the hip young Wall Street traders and attorneys used it to unwind. I never actually saw him take anything, but he came into my dorm room one day junior year asking if I had any painkillers. I pulled a bottle of gin out of my desk and told him that was the only painkiller I needed, and he laughed but said, no, seriously. When I informed him that I didn't (which wasn't entirely true because I had most of a Percocet prescription left over, though I wasn't about to commit a felony for a few bucks), he asked my roommate, who was a bit of a stoner but not a junkie and also someone he barely knew. My roommate seemed taken aback that he would make such a request, and I was inclined to agree.
The problem became more serious later that year, when he started stealing from his roommate. They had been together since Freshman year without incident, and there was enough trust between them that the roommate would leave his wallet out on his desk when in class. This guy would then fill his gas tank and be back before his roommate returned (this was in the days when most credit card purchases required a signature; gas stations didn't if you paid at the pump). After the roommate found out he informed the administration and this guy was banned from the dorms. He still attended the school, though he had huge gaps in his day with nowhere to go, and he was embarrassed for other people to find out what had happened, so he'd hang around the dorm entrance and wait for somebody to go in, and since everyone recognized him as a resident he'd usually be let in, and he'd find a not-too close acquaintance to hang out with until his next class. I let him in once after he supposedly forgot his keys and he decided to hang out in my room for a couple hours, which I thought was odd since that never happened in the preceding two and a half years, but whatever. By this point, my roommate had withdrawn and I had a single room, and a day or so later this guy asked my if I'd mind letting him stay in the extra bed for a couple nights. By this point, I knew what was going on and asked him what was wrong with his own bed down the hall, and he gave me some bullshit answer about not some unspecified problems with his own roommate, and in the spirit of malicious compliance I told him that if it was that bad I'd be happy to have him for the rest of the year so long as he put an official request in, which in my experience would be approved by the end of the day. But if there was something he wasn't telling me then absolutely not or I could get in serious trouble. After I informed the rest of our friends of this exchange it was agreed that the administration had to be informed, and everyone in the dorm had to know that they weren't to let him in under any circumstances. After we reported him, he was expelled.
For a long time, I've had a personal policy of not getting involved in other people's drama, and it's served me well. What I mean by that is that if two people I know are having a dispute and one confides in me I tell them that I can sympathize but since I'm not involved I don't know everything about what's going on and, he (or she) hasn't done anything to me personally, so I'm not going to take sides in a matter that's really none of my business. That being said, if I am involved, and the offense is serious enough, I'm not going to pull any punches, even if it ends up destroying your life. I was friends with this guy, but we weren't exactly close; we hung out a lot, but I primarily was friends with him through other people. As all his other friends dropped off, I tried to remain aloof and neutral. When he asked me to do something that could land me in serious trouble so he could keep up the facade of still living in the dorms, that was the last straw. He seriously thought I didn't know he was a thief and would have no problem letting him live with me; for all I know, he had plans to steal from me had I been sucker enough to let him stay.
I don't know if the drug use was a way for an insecure guy to try to look cool, or if the claims that it was cool were justifications for his using it to cope with insecurity, but I really don't know that it matters. What I did learn from this, as well as from every situation similar to this that I've witnessed, is that people who are intent on destroying their lives aren't going to listen to reason, and are going to continue alienating everyone around them until there's nobody left and they're forced to face God alone. I understand the virtues of loyalty, but it's a two way street, and patience runs out if the other person doesn't show loyalty in return and tries to take advantage of you. To my friend's credit, as far as these things go, he never tried to guilt trip anyone or talk crap about anyone or intentionally create drama. The numerous times we told him that his behavior was unacceptable, that narcotics addiction wasn't cool, and that he'd never achieve his goals by going down this road, he wouldn't get angry but just roll his eyes and tell us we didn't know what we were talking about, or just say "okay" and then keep doing what he was doing.
The good news is that this story at least appears to have a somewhat happy ending. I lost touch with this guy as soon as he was expelled, and haven't talked to him since. A year or two later I heard he had gone to rehab and was back in some kind of school, though this may have been community college. All of this info comes from a friend who was closer to him than I was and who I used to talk to on the phone regularly. When the subject came up, he said he didn't know much but the situation while we were in school was worse than I realized at the time, though he either didn't provide details or I don't remember them. About a decade ago I found out he was selling industrial supplies for some company in the exurbs. More recently, I found out he married a girl who did the kind of low-level bookkeeping someone with an associate's degree in accounting does and they were living in a fairly nice area with a kid or two. The friend didn't know if he worked for the same company or what he was doing now.
It's certainly a decent life, but it's a far cry from what he wanted to be. Sales guys can make more money than I do, but money does not equal status. The best he can hope for on that front, where he is now, is hanging out with local contractors and small-town bank managers at steakhouses housed in strip malls, and a couple times a year taking his wife out to one of the restaurants with dazzling views of the city that attract the kind of people who say "ooh, classy" when they walk inside but that no one with any kind of real status would be caught dead in, not least of which because they serve overpriced "funeral food". Then again, maybe had he been more mature he'd have realized that this was a life worth pursuing, since those of us who ended up working in Downtown offices with floor to ceiling windows and personal secretaries realized that all that gets you is invitations to impossibly boring parties hosted by judges and politicians that everyone attends out of obligation and no one actually enjoys. Then again, maybe the whole status thing was a phase he would have grown out of, or maybe he would have just been to untalented or lazy to ever have a shot at the big leagues to begin with.
Circling back to Lana, I'm guessing that she had a personal crisis that she couldn't handle, and for whatever reason she found herself looking more for validation than practical advice, and when the people in her life started telling her things she didn't want to hear, she lashed out and cut them off. It's not like her family and friends were all Republicans who supported Trump and she couldn't take them anymore; it seems like she alienated people on all sides of the political spectrum. And when you cut yourself off from everyone in your life, what's left? It's not just you and God alone now, because there will always be internet message boards where the friendless will always be able to receive unconditional validation for their poor choices or get endlessly berated, depending on which board it is and who's logged on at the time. Something tells me that neither is what this woman needs. I hope she gets help and can lead a happy, productive life again, but I don't think politics has much to do with it.
You’re a mainstream liberal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but you tend to either be blind to wokeness because it’s like water to fish for you, or ignore it because it’s politically inconvenient to have such illiberal and unpopular allies.
Shunning used to be something cults did, but wokeness mainstreamed it as part of its attacks on free speech.
Is this the setup for a Mitch-Hedburg-style joke?
"Shunning used to be something only cults did. It still is, but it used to be too."
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What does this mean?
It means they serve mediocre wedding-at-a-country club dishes in a venue that has the ambience of a funeral home.
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God damn it, addicts are addicted and no amount of waspish dressings down can overpower chemical dependence. Nobody wants to ruin their life - that's cope - they are reacting to stimuli. Modern society has twisted that stimuli and now perverse incentives make it easier than ever to self destruct. Did he really think it was cool or was it actually just cope?! Like he was stealing from your friend thinking "I'm Remington Steele!" and not 'I don't want to feel any more, my head is pounding, my arms are shaking, my stomach roils but worst of all is the shame, the knowledge I am doing the wrong thing and I can't stop, I hate myself but I can't stop.'*
Call no man happy until he is dead. You are right that he didn't achieve his dreams and you are right that you have more status than he does. You are right that he will never achieve your level of success, and he won't have to suffer through parties and a corner office. But he also isn't bitching about you on an anonymous forum for contrarian autists.
*I'm not saying 'just be nice to junkies and let them do what they want' I'm saying what I said, nobody wants to self destruct. Enabling is not kindness.
That you know of.
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I think you’re wrong about this. Many people lean into their problems rather than out. Sometimes because - as cope - they convince themselves that they’re self destructing in order to live up to their ideals and then self-destruct harder to prove it. Sometimes because they sabotage themselves rather than risk failure with no excuse.
Mentally healthy people do not want to self destruct, no. Doing so 'as cope' is talking themselves into it via perverse incentives, but they don't want to self destruct, they want the psychological comfort of believing they are in control.
Edit: "They just want to self destruct" is a defense mechanism. It is a person saying they have tried to help in every way they can think of and it doesn't work and so they must want it. But addicts and other mentally ill people can be helped - it's just really unpleasant and hard, harder than anyone should have to go through without a salary. Which is to say nobody should be expected to do it and shouldn't feel ashamed that they didn't. But that doesn't mean that the mentally ill want to self destruct, that doesn't mean they are intent on destroying their lives and bringing everyone else down with them - that is just easier to accept than your own helplessness.
I don't literally mean 'want' as in literally 'will happily tell you that this is their intention'. I mean 'want' as in 'cannot be swayed from their path' i.e. they act as though they want to self destruct. Saying so is a defense mechanism, yes, but it's also that I have known such people and they will reject, subvert and oppose anything that will actually help them so actively that 'want' seems to be the correct word for it.
I do not think that ordinary people can help this subset of addicts and the mentally ill because that would require the power and authority to straight-up enforce 'help' on unwilling recipients, and in some cases it would take active mind-control.
But by saying they want to self destruct all you are doing is absolving yourself of the responsibility to help them by putting your failure on them. I'm saying absolve yourself of responsibility, it's not your responsibility to fix them any more than you feel is required of your morals - but don't put your failure on them. If you write people off, you probably had good reasons, but you still wrote them off. Saying you wrote them off because they made you is passing the buck. Like always, my biggest concern is personal responsibility.
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My maybe hot take is that addicts are optimists. However intolerable they find their lives and/or motivated by warped incentives they are, they choose to kill themselves one day at a time instead of permanently, always telling themselves that they're going to quit.
Speaking as an on-off alcoholic who has generally trended from "pathetic, shut-in drunk who blacks out every night" in my early 20s to "incorrigible barfly" in my late 20s, to "weekend warrior who hits a happy hour or two a week out of boredom" I guess that my tolerance for feeling like shit during the day has declined and my desire to be present instead of hungover during the day has increased as I've gotten older. I'll probably never have great impulse control as far as drinking is concerned, but I have or at least try to have better things to do with my free time. My father has been an 18 pack of coors light a night guy as long as I can recall and I have no clue how he does it in his late 50s. I'm not tough enough and/or don't hate myself enough to do that.
I'm far from a sage or any kind of example to follow but if asked for advice I just tell people that they have to find something better to live for, something better to be for. Maybe professionals can help there, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect a layman, friend, or spouse to be able to find that thing for you.
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I mean, some people commit suicide, and if that's not choosing to self-destruct I don't know what is.
A lot of it, though, occurs to me as an adolescent exploration of boundaries.
People who commit suicide usually see it as an improvement, not as destruction. They just don't want to be miserable anymore.
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If there's a valid point here it's extraordinarily minor and this was a terrible way to make it. The post doesn't scan to me as even close to bitching.
You seem to be focused on pedantry, based on your determination that the suicidal fit who I was talking about because suicide is self destruction, so I don't think you are interested in my point. Talking, if bitching is too 'harsh'.
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That is why I said "It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband." I assume Obergefell was also not the actual inciting incident of her divorce--but yes, in retrospect, I definitely see those as coincidences in the most literal sense of the term, unrelated stage-setting events that would become relevant as the story unfolded.
Of course I can't refute this with great certainty. I can report on what I saw myself, filling in some gaps with what was reported to me by others, and if you don't find the correlations compelling, what more can I say? I agree with you, strongly, about the results of cutting people off, for whatever reason; humans do not generally thrive under that condition.
But I know why I was cut off, in this particular story. And I know whose politics correlate more strongly with cutting people off for political reasons. The culture war in general may or may not have been the beating heart of Lana's problems (depending on one's thoughts concerning the possible psychological hazards of generic 90s feminism), but the idea that her problems had nothing to do with the culture war in general strikes me as... unlikely.
Do you know how her ex-husband is doing now?
Not in any detail. I just googled him and he's still got a profile page at the same law firm he was at 20 years ago.
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