Nine years ago the Bad Pixie started a Twitter account. Shortly afterwards I joined Twitter to follow her. After she friended me I sent this tweet. Back then our tweets were like conversations, a lot of back and forth about her children, her goats, and life in general. We made jokes with each other and even talked about her history research - a subject that was really boring to me.
What changed? The times for one. Our society continued to become more polarized politically. She had always been on the conservative side of things. The other thing was her health. She was working two jobs when I first met her along with raising a household of five girls. She was prone to seizures due to her degenerative brain disease, something that was genetic and with no cure. As her condition she gave up one job and then the other. She had a series of small strokes. Finally she has reach the point where she is bedridden a good deal of the time.
As her health got worse with time she became more bitter about life in general and like so many conservative Americans she looked for a scapegoat for her anger. At an earlier time all her venom was directed at the Watchtower Society, the Jehovah's Witnesses. Now she broadened it to include Democrats, liberals, and globalists. If you look at her Twitter feed from the past 2-3 years you will see it full of hateful comments about liberals as rapists and murderers who want to give our country to drug-dealing hispanics, one-world antifascists, and all muslims.
I found it insulting that she slandered liberal Americans that way when she knew one of her friends (for nearly 10 years) was a progressive Democrat, but our friendship meant nothing to her and I realized it never did. She used me as a convenient ear to her wit, and an occasional post to her web page. When I stopped agreeing with her; when I spoke up and challenged her beliefs, she had no use for me anymore.
If you look at her Twitter feed today you will see her few friends are an elderly gentleman who helps her research the Jehovah's Witnesses, and a few fiction writers she has befriended over the years. All of them avoid talking politics with her. She also follows a large group of extreme right-wing bigots. If some of them are not Russian-bots, then they get much of their "information" from them. These people are a small minority of Americans, with a big hatred for anything they cannot control and therefore must blame for their frustrations in life. They wrap themselves up in the flag and uniformly love Trump and hate anyone whom he hates.
When we first met ages ago on Second Life it was thrilling to make friends with people from all over the world. Of the friends I had I was able to meet two face-to-face. One of them is still a Facebook friend and sadly one other passed away. Even though we live on opposite coasts, I had always wanted to meet the Bad Pixie. I envisioned meeting her and all her family, maybe taking them all out to dinner and learning more about each other's real lives. Sadly that was not to be. Friendship cannot be one-sided. I have wasted too much time on a fiction. Goodbye Pixie.
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