A Twin’s Perspective on Friendship

By Madeleine Kando

It is difficult to define friendship, but like many other indefinable things in life, ‘you know it when it’s there’. It is more like beauty or art, something that you value for its own sake. As soon as you try to exploit it for personal gain, it vanishes. It’s like trying to catch your own shadow.

I am not talking about the Facebook kind of ‘friend’. I am talking about the bond that is created between two people who decide to devote their time and energy to a mutually agreed upon relationship that is completely voluntary. Unlike other types of relationships like family ties, romantic ties or business ties, where you have some kind of ‘obligation’ to each other, friendship survives on the complete absence of rules. It is literally the stuff of dreams. A friendship is like a dream that you have with another person. And just like a dream, friendship is fragile.

The root word for friend is fréon (to love), which is connected to freo (not in bondage, acting of one's own will). It describes friendship to a T. It is one of the most democratic arrangements in social interactions. And just like a Democratic arrangement, if you don’t work at maintaining a friendship, it just disappears, without complaining or throwing a tantrum.

One factor that has influenced my view of friendship, is the fact that I am a twin. My sister is actually not at all like me. She is uninhibited and blunt and she acts out her frustrations by lashing out. I am self-conscious, reserved and eat up all my anger. But we were never really ‘alone’. There was always this other you that wasn’t you.

We were close growing up, since people couldn’t tell us apart, but for years, we were compelled to create conflict to prove that we were really two people. Especially after my father left and we had to vie for our only parent’s attention.

We have come full circle, however. With the help of distance and time (my twin in Spain, me in the States), we are finally able to meet each other as equals, like two branches on an old tree with a common base. We can talk to each other, accept each other and let bygones be bygones.

I had several friends, on my way to old age, most of them women. There was Marijke in high school, back in Holland. She lived in a beautiful, old style Dutch house with a thatched roof and a large garden with cherry trees. Why we were friends, I don’t remember. She actually decided that we should be, not me. Then, there was Barbara. Beautiful, tall, intoxicating Barbara. We were friends too, to the point of embarking on a secret correspondence based on a semi-pornographic series of teenage books called ‘the thousand and one nights’. Barbara sometimes gave me a ride home on her bike. I sat on the rack behind her, holding her narrow waist, her long skirts brushing against my legs. Her long pony tail reminded me of a beautiful, shiny race horse.

It's the Guns, Stupid

Tom Kando

It happened again - May 14: Ten  innocent civilians (mostly black) mowed down by a racist lunatic. This time it happened  in Buffalo. Eleven  days earlier  it was  my hometown, Sacramento: Six dead - half of them women, half people of color.

American mass murder will never stop. We are moving in the wrong direction. After every  mass shooting, thousands more  add to their arsenal. There are  four hundred million fire arms in private hands in this country, and the number is growing. An increasing proportion of these weapons are rapid-fire automatic, capable of firing dozens to hundreds of rounds per minute. They are created for mass murder and nothing else.

Public opinion is also moving in the wrong direction - with ever lower levels of support for gun control legislation.

Judicial decisions increasingly favor out-of-control gun ownership of any kind by anybody.

First, there was the 2^nd Amendment It stated that Aa well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.@ Over time,  the first half of this amendment became ignored. Judges came to misinterpret the amendment, ignoring the vast differences between the eighteenth century and current conditions. 

In  District of Columbia vs. Heller (2008),  the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess firearms independent of service in a state militia and to use firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, including self‑defense within the home.

The powerful NRA lobby  had done its job. Many additional judicial decisions at all levels confirmed the new interpretation  of the 2^nd amendment.  A recent example occurred on May 11, 2022, when a US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California=s  law banning the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under twenty-one  is unconstitutional. And so the 2^nd amendment, which was questionable to begin with, morphed into a sacrosanct protection of one of the few constitutionally enumerated  rights placed above all else. Presciently, Chief Supreme Court  Justice Warren Burger had declared  in 1991 that the Second Amendment is a fraud.  True: the amendment=s current interpretation is most certainly fraudulent.

The Culture Wars, Neologisms and Some Other Strategies

Tom Kando 

Nothing plays a more important role than language in the Culture War that has been raging in this country for decades. Both the Left and the Right weaponize and change the meaning of existing words, or invent new words-as-weapons - neologisms. 

A classic example is the conversion of the word “gay,” starting some sixty years ago. One must watch old black-and-white Fred Astair type movies to remember this word’s previous meaning. 

Such verbal strategies are often (not always) derogatory. They ridicule a group or an individual. Their implied meaning may be different from or the opposite of the one that is verbalized. Some are invented and used by the Right to mock the Left, some the other way around, and some are used by both sides. 

1. The label "Politically Correct"   is a case in point. By the 1970s, American conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh succeeded in transforming this expression from its original literal meaning into an epithet describing excessive Left-wing zeal. Taken at face value, being politically correct would simply mean what it says. Consider the following statement: “Harming or killing someone because of their race, gender or sexual preference is a hate crime, and the punishment of such a crime should be exceptionally harsh.” 

If you agree with this statement, you might say: “That's right.” 

However, if you judge this to be a “politically correct statement,” you are signaling that you DISAGREE with it, and that you probably don’t have any use for the concept of “hate crime” at all. You are conservative and you hate political correctness. 

2, Sex and gender are among the culture war’s major fronts. A word-as-weapon recently developed by the Right is “grooming:” Thanks to Florida governor DeSantis and the legislature, the state now has an anti-grooming law. It forbids using the word “gay” and dealing with sexual orientation and gender identity in primary school sex education classes. The reasoning here is that such information would predispose (i.e. “groom”) children towards (gay) sex and gender crossing. Child grooming is an existing crime, committed by pedophiles when they prime and entice their victims.