___________________________________________________
I would like to share with you a collection of Tea Party propaganda emails. I would like to, but I can't. Because I deleted them.
Marcella appears to have received at least one of the same emails:
"I had a friend who joined the Tea Party when it was new. She sent me an email full of misinformation. I sat down and painstaking corrected all her mistakes with citations to where she could find the sources. Then I thought, I can't send her this. So I started over. Once again I had to correct her mistakes. And then I thought I can't do this. I just wrote her out of my life."
I want to applaud her for writing this person out of her life. She must be more strong-willed than I am. Like Marcella, I composed detailed responses to these emails, complete with links to credible news sources, press releases, and fact-checking websites, and then thought, "I can't send this." Unlike Marcella, I did not voluntarily write the original sender our of my life. Because I thought I was going to marry him.
I could look past his uninformed perspective - he didn't seek out information about politics and current events on his own, instead relying on Tea Party-esque emails his grandmother forwarded him from the comfort of her home in a rural, homogeneously white town in Michelle Bachmann country. I could look past a lot of things: our divided political associations (as addressed in a New York Times Motherload blog "Parental Quandary"), his lack of personal responsibility, my frustration at his inability to plan anything in advance, and the fact that we lived hundreds of miles apart.
I could look past all of this because I love him, and because I fell in love with him long before any of these issues came up. And yet, every time he forwarded me one of those Tea Party emails, I did what Marcella did. Minus the writing him out of my life part. And then he wrote me out. Not over Tea Party emails, or politics, or anything I can actually put my finger on. And he said we could be friends, but like that ever works...
And so I found myself in the same position as Marcella, by different means. I began the purge. I threw out everything that ever belonged to him, that he ever gave me, and that reminded me of him in the slightest. I tried (unsuccessfully) to sell the table we bought together at Ikea on Craigslist. I threw out the ice packs and socks he left in my freezer. Yes, he left a pair of socks in my freezer. And I threw the Tea Party emails into Gmail's virtual trash can.
So I can't share these emails with you, even though I'm sure you'd find them immensely entertaining. But I can tell you that Marcella's comment reminds me of the power of saying "good riddance," and the fact that hopefully, despite my devastation at losing the man I want to spend the rest of my life with, I will no longer have to deal with Tea Party emails. Or frozen socks.
