CHAPTER FIVE - TWO HOUSES

We need to address the donkey and the elephant in the room…

First off, Dear Nurse, I have to thank you.

Not only have you been reading my journey thus far, but you’ve been sharing it with others and reaching out to me through the website. Please know how honored I feel to have your council and your audience, but also how moved I am by your willingness to share my story and mission with others. The more of you I know are out there, the more I feel compelled to see this through, share my deepest truths, and do the hard work to get where I need to be.

Secondly, several of you have expressed concerns about Romeo’s new political affiliation, and have advised me to leave this “Trumper” in the dust.

Let me first say that I hear you. Romeo’s change of party - and rather exuberant affiliation with conservatism - is troubling for a few reasons. The first is a myriad of political and social issues we will not see eye to eye on, and because we are both passionate individuals, this is bound to cause problems.

But the second, and perhaps bigger issue, is the switch itself. His apparent need to align himself with any group, particularly one that has come to be associated with white supremacy, denial of facts, the erosion of a woman’s right to choose, anti Black and LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

And this is where we find true similarity to Shakespeare’s timeless tale, except that it isn’t the ancient grudge of the Montagues and Capulets, but our very own political system - Republicans versus Democrats - making civil hands unclean.

But here’s the thing, Dear Nurse, and I feel this more passionately than I can adequately express in words: if the political divisions in this country have gotten so contentious that two people who truly care for one another can’t make it work merely because of party affiliation, then we have all lost. Period.

So, I’m going to do the hard work here, not just to understand Romeo and the other side in some capacity, but also to understand myself. Other than the fact that I vote democratic like, always, no question, full stop, I have never taken the time to add up all of my beliefs and see where I actually fall on the political spectrum. I figured I would take the day to go ahead and find out.

Saturday is my day with the girls now, so while they played in the sprinkler in the downstairs garden of our little apartment complex, I did some quizzes.

The first was a bit of a surprise, not that I’m considered a “solid liberal” by the PEW Research Center’s Political Typology Quiz, but that we are the “most democratic” of all groups, and make up only 16% of the population. But what exactly is a “solid liberal”, and how does that make me “the most democratic”? I’ve never considered myself extreme by any measure, and this seemed to suggest I am. So, I continued.

On to politicalcompass.org, which scored me squarely on the left, with a leaning toward libertarianism. Okay… that was something. When Romeo and I first discussed politics on that Friday night - brief though the conversation was - he said though he calls himself a conservative republican, he’s probably more of a libertarian. Great, okay. Maybe we have more in common than I thought.

So, I took a libertarian quiz to discover I’m only considered a “soft core” libertarian. “Soft core”… I hadn’t thought about sex in days, yet suddenly I was comparing my belief system to New York City’s channel 35 in the 90s, the public access of shitty porn. But still, I had a glimmer of hope that perhaps Romeo and I might find some common ground… until I realized there is a stark difference between left-wing libertarians and those on the right. How the hell could one term mean such vastly different things to such vastly different people? And that was only the beginning.

While pushing Little on the garden swing, I attempted a deep dive into what it truly means to be “a conservative”, rather than succumbing to my usual projection of a paunchy, rich, old, White dude who goes to church on Sunday, spits at the poor, and diddles his only-kinda-consenting housekeeper when wifey’s at book club.

As soon as I started reading, I was immediately exhausted, and not just because of the ocular migraine I had while playing Dream Phone with Big that afternoon. There are literally twenty-five different ideological attributes someone can be referring to when they say they are conservative. And several of them, at least to my untrained eye, are contradictory. How can you be for deregulation and against government interference, but believe women should be prohibited from making decisions about their own bodies? That America shouldn’t intervene in the affairs of other nations, but that we should export our brand of democracy through force of arms? All I could make heads or tails of, was that you only need to agree with one or two of the twenty-five statements to call yourself a conservative. But if that’s the case, then does the term mean anything other than wanting to call yourself something? Like, what’s Montague, right? I don’t get it. (To be clear, I’m not ragging on conservative republicans - or any group - for failing to properly define themselves. The same is true for the democratic party, and nearly every single organization that has existed for more than a decade. And that’s because parties change, they evolve, they get corrupted, they course correct, and so on, just like people do.)

Okay, so I could do all the research in the world into political terms and their watered-down meanings, but that wasn’t going to tell me if Romeo would embarrass me at a party. I needed something a bit more current; more mainstream. Romeo had mentioned something about how most media was left-leaning, and there wasn’t much out there for folks like him. Okay, then perhaps I needed to take a look at some conservative broadcasting.

I’ve seen Fox News, and it literally gives me hemorrhoids. It is so blatantly one-sided and manipulative that it sends me into a blind, butthole-clenched fury. But it isn’t just because I fundamentally disagree with what they’re saying, I have the same problem with a lot of MSNBC. Any “news” organization that uses its platform to bitch and moan like an annoying drunk uncle on a family road trip, deserves to be blocked from the airwaves. That’s what talk radio is for, and that’s why it sucks. So instead, I decided to give Newsmax a try.

It started out fine, actually. I watched the end of Dick Morris Democracy while the girls played in the bedroom, and I cooked dinner. It was a strange, COVID-style broadcast. Chubby Dick sitting in his home library, rattling on with a British guest, who seemed reasonably intelligent - as most Brits do. The two were having a debate about Biden’s handling of US troops left in Afghanistan after the Taliban take-over, and though I didn’t agree with all of it, Dick was clearly representing his opinions as just that - opinions. Not fact, not policy, opinions. And he wasn’t losing his mind, shouting, or hurling insults, he was just talking. Cool, Dick. I mean, you’re on a channel calling itself news, but you’re not pulling any wool. We’re good, sir.

I turned away to keep the rice from burning and nuke the leftover broccoli I would force the girls to eat. When I turned back, I thought my laptop must have somehow switched itself to a Saturday Night Live skit. I leaned in. Laughed for a second, then realized it wasn’t a joke at all. It was Diamond and Silk Crystal Clear, two expertly coiffed Black women sitting in a living room, demanding Biden’s resignation and the reinstatement of Donald Trump, on the basis that the latter would never broadcast military secrets to the enemy. (Which Trump absolutely DID by the way, when withdrawing troops from Syria.) The most absurd part was that Silk didn’t speak at all, just offered enthusiastic “m-hm”s after every two or three words Diamond uttered, clearly reading from a script sitting just below camera.

This struck me as manipulative on more levels than I care to go into tonight, but it didn’t stop there. The following program might as well have been Fox and Friends. A White man sitting behind a “news” desk, calling for the abolishment of critical race theory and woke-ness. Laughing and sneering at those who believe the United States isn’t just the best damn country in the whole freakin’ world. Yeesh… Dearest Nurse, if this is the kind of shit Romeo is into, I can’t get down, I really can’t.

But, it's impossible to get to the heart of someone’s beliefs in their absence. All I have to go on are the snippets of political discourse we did have. The bits I was trying to breeze past and ignore in favor of getting laid. Try as I might, however, these few points slipped through:

He’s still an atheist. Cool. I’m more or less a secular Pagan, which, among other things, means I believe all humans are divine regardless of spiritual belief, and to each their own. So, we’re good here.

He used three different political terms to define himself: Conservative Republican, which we’ve been over. Libertarianism, which is confusing, but at its core means he believes in liberty, freedom of choice, and minimal state intervention. I can only hope this means he’s pro-choice. I’ve had an abortion, I don’t regret it, and I would be horrified if my girls came of age in a world where they were not afforded the same right. I could write a treatise on the unconstitutionality and moral bankruptcy of restricting a woman’s right to choose, but that’s not what you or I are here for.

And the last term he threw out is actually one I remember him using sixteen years ago when we were together: that he’s a bit of an “anarchist” when it comes to his views on government. I’m not trying to be an asshole here, but this one makes me giggle. As far as I know, there are exactly zero anarchist governments operating in the world today, only communes. And the communes basically look like the trash-filled, homeless encampment down the street from me on Ventura Boulevard. Romeo is from Miami, vapes, and trims his pubes. He would fucking loose his shit in an anarchist commune. But for some reason - probably a stupid one - I think this one is kinda cute. My little, wanna-be anarchist.

Additionally, he thinks QAnon is total bullshit, which is a major relief. I can not get down with that kind of baby-eating nonsense. He did express that Trump is a problematic figurehead for the republican party, though he didn’t denounce him completely, so there’s that… (Well, I did get him to say Trump was an asshole, but I was holding his cock at the time, so I don’t exactly know if he meant it…) But he did say he loves Ted Cruz, which, if I had eaten prior to our first meeting, might have made me vomit on the palm leaf printed banquette we were sitting on. I can’t stand that spineless, flip-flopping, Mexican-vacationing weasel. But, that said, there are plenty of democratic politicians I don’t dig… Either way, I’m not going to let Ted Schmooze dictate who I do and do not date. Fuck that guy.

So, all this is to say, is that I just don’t know. I spent the whole day trying to figure out the score, and if politics would destroy us, only to come up with a big, fat, goose egg. First and only time in my life I will ever want Kellyanne Conway’s advice on anything. But shit, if she and George made it work…

What I do know is this, Dear Nurse, you needn’t be scared for me. I am going into this with my eyes wide open. I will not seek to change or be changed, only to listen and do my best to understand. But Paris and I were completely aligned politically, and it didn’t work. Not only did it not work, it was pretty damn miserable at times. So, perhaps true compatibility runs much deeper than identification with a malleable and mercurial set of ideas, many of which aren’t based in any current societal reality, but fraught idealism.

After all, what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; so Romeo would were he not “conservative” call’d… right?

Maybe, if we can just put one foot in front of the other, and handle each situation as it comes with compassion and empathy, we’ll be fine. Fuck it. I’ll say better than fine. That would be fucking great.

So, Romeo, doff thy name; and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all myself.

Sincerely yours,

Juliet