I have a friend whom I have known since junior high school. We have a lot in common. We both grew up in blue collar families. We were both in advanced classes together and shared most of the same friends. We're both happily married. We both share the same work ethic. We even have pets of the same breed. The similarities stop there. He comes from a conservative family, and I come from a progressive family. This has led to different choices in life, and apparently different outcomes.
A few years ago, my husband's employer told him that we were being relocated to a certain red state in two weeks. We panicked. Aside from moving to a new region where our nearest friends and family members would be two thousand miles away, we simply did not want to live in a red state. It would negatively impact both our career arcs. It lacked everything we do for entertainment, and none of our favorite stores had locations in the entire state. I looked at the website of the city newspaper, and it was advertising a KKK gathering - on the main page. Something along the lines of "it's not illegal, and by the way, here's the address." We scrambled and networked and pulled strings, and quickly found a better opportunity in our home state.
My old school friend moved there voluntarily.
My friend felt his new home to be a place of refuge, where he could be himself, live his values, and speak his mind openly. It was his sanctuary. I know this because he posts about it on Facebook all the time. He also shares political memes and inflammatory political posts. I like having him in my feed because it gives me a sense of a different value system. He is one of maybe half a dozen extreme political posters I keep around. Since their views generally seem to overlap, even though they don't know one another, I see this as a reasonable barometer of diverging opinion.
What are "they" posting about since the inauguration? Jokes about the Obamas and the Clintons. Jokes about protestors. Proclamations about abortion. General mockery of liberal ideology. That's fair - mockery seems to be the way we handle polarized beliefs, and I don't take it personally. I like my friends, and I try to appreciate them as people and not as representatives of a belief system.
I was thus bemused when my friend shared a screen shot of a private message he apparently sent to Mark Zuckerberg. It reads: "How come I don't see anything about the Dow Jones going above 20,000 in my Trending Topics? Are you trying to suppress the news?"
It seems that my friend believes the historic new Dow average is a positive reaction to the inauguration of President Trump.
If I enjoyed trolling people or picking fights, which I don't, I would have commented, "Thanks Obama ;-)" Instead, I pondered the ways in which my life is different from my old friend's life.
I went to college. He didn't. I live in a house with a market value higher than the current listing price of the entire 46-unit apartment complex where I grew up. At least until recently, he lived as a guest in his brother-in-law's trailer. I am in the top ten percent of income. He is a long-haul trucker. I have been whipping out my iPhone a lot these past few months, checking my portfolio with keen interest. I have a strong suspicion that my friend has no investments at all, and probably not even an emergency savings cushion. My personal net worth has roughly tripled in the last eight years, while I have seen my friend and his family fall on hard times. For these reasons, I feel it would be unfair, possibly cruel, to engage my old friend in a discussion about the stock market.
As an active investor, I know that there are corrections and crashes on the horizon. I've been in the market long enough to see a thing or two. The records are clear, and the market simply performs better under Democratic administrations. This is where things get weird in my mind. Due to my personal history, I can look at events from two perspectives, of affluence and of poverty. I can acknowledge that stock market fluctuations do not generally have any impact on anyone in the bottom half of income distribution. I will feel the effects of a crash personally, while my friend will think of the market only when its behavior appears to reinforce his ideological affiliation.
I can easily imagine the upper-middle-class professional version of my old friend. I remember him as a cute, funny, flirtatious boy who was certainly as bright as I am. He could have worked his way through college just like I did. I have other conservative friends, equally intelligent, who rejected the path to university because they were uncomfortable with the cultural values they saw expressed there. It is unlikely that they see the results of their life choices in the same light that I do. I ask myself why someone would voluntarily live in an economically depressed area with few job options. They have no interest in the routine luxuries of my life and don't feel that they are missing out on anything. I recognize and respect the elements of Stoic philosophy here. I also see that the prosperity of my household makes it far easier for me to endorse progressive values. Whether the reverse is true is debatable, but a case can be made.