Bat-Shit Crazy and I'm Not Talking About Me For Once

I talk regularly with a woman who just celebrated 60 days of sobriety.  I like her well enough.  I'm not enthralled with her but no shit, right?  Outside of Willie and SuperK I'm not enthralled with anyone.  She's quite religious - which is perfectly OK with me - and she's got a healthy drive to control the behavior of everyone else - which hardly makes her an outlier in Alcoholics Anonymous.  Controlling other people is like First Grade stuff for us.  Like me she's pretty self-righteous about her beliefs and pretty dismissive if your beliefs diverge from hers.  I had heard that she was surprised to discover that the members of our meeting lean one way politically so I approached her post-meeting one day just to make sure that no one had been trying to force their beliefs on her, a big A.A. no-no.  She took this as an opening to express her opinions about people on the opposite side of the political spectrum and for her this meant a quite impassioned critique of the many ills and woes and failings of the opposition.  She really got going.  Some of her thoughts were reasonable political opinions but some of them were thinkly veiled conspiracy crap.  The thing that struck me at the time is that her appearance changed.  She looked ugly and angry and aggressive.  It was really quite amazing to watch.  I demurred for a minute while she spoke until I finally just said: "I'm going to back out of the discussion here" and walked away.

This is why we keep politics out of meetings.  This is why we look carefully at our response to the world at large, to make sure that we're behaving reasonably and kindly.  The world, in most cases, has a lot of nuance to it.  Things are rarely black and white or present themselves in such stark, definitive terms.  She has a world of trouble with her daughter and I can see why - she was driving hard to the hoop and she barely knows me.  We all take liberties with those closest to us so I can only imagine how critical and overbearing she could be with family.  I was never going to be best friends with her - she always impressed me as being a little sanctimonious, a little pious, a little "my shit don't stink" in her opinions.  But now I give her a wide berth because I don't want to try to convince someone that the moon landing was faked or that there's a wharehouse in New Mexico full of well-fed aliens.  Crazy is crazy.