The Boat Shoe Beat: The Great Betrayal

I have learned to hate all traitors, and there is no disease that I spit on more than treachery.

Aeschylus

I first met the Murphy family when I was probably around eight or nine years old. My family, through some community networking, had found a local family that was planning on enrolling their daughters in a nearby private school, one I was scheduled to attend. Of course, our local public schools were atrocious even over twenty years ago (for the pretty typical reasons that polite company is usually too afraid to mention). It was there at the “public” pool (more or less segregated due to cost prohibitive fees) and on a hot summer day that I met Mrs. Leah Murphy and her two daughters, Rose and Holly. For the next two decades, they would act as my second, albeit surrogate, family.

Due to the distance of this “nearby” private school, I carpooled with the Murphy family to the historic city of Fredericksburg. Every morning I would be dropped off at their home and we would take the forty minute drive through the gentle rolling hills and farms of Virginia and, finally, enter downtown Fredericksburg’s beautifully brick lined streets. We ended our morning commute on the old Sunken Road that lead to Marye’s Heights and then a now-defunct Catholic elementary and middle school. The school and grounds, surrounded by Confederate dead, sat atop Marye’s Heights and we could look down and imagine the Southern defenders and the waves of ill-fated Yankee attackers. The Murphy family commute was always filled with laughter, jokes, story-telling, and other heartfelt memories of my youth.

After middle school, we split up, at least academically, when we aged out of the school and needed to look for alternatives. I moved on to a Southern Baptist middle school and they continued in various other Catholic schools. Despite being in different schools, we still enjoyed each other’s company. Throughout these years, we would go on vacations together (to Ocean City, Maryland or Hilton Head, South Carolina), play around the safe streets of our small town throughout the summer, go to the pool, make almost weekly visits to Kings Dominion or Busch Gardens, explore the grounds of Richmond’s Maymont Park and Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, and pick pumpkins at Belvedere Plantation. I was no longer an only child, I had my sisters from another family. And, in fact, I had two loving proxy parents in Mrs. Murphy and her husband, Matthew (that’s not to diminish my love for my actual family, but my old man was far from Ward Cleaver).

Things started changing in high school. I enrolled in an all-male, military, Catholic high school in Richmond. They went to the sister school right down the road. We were still friends, but things change in high school, priorities for young men certainly do. Then, college came and our relationship (myself and the Murphy family by and large) went dormant, not out of a falling out, but life kept moving in different directions. I still stayed somewhat in touch with them throughout this time – from college, to graduation, to entering the workforce. That’s when I started identifying the stark differences in all of us – our path from adolescence to adulthood.

I never had time to “discover myself” or any of that millennial mumbo-jumbo. I was needed with my family and, more importantly, I needed to work and financially support my family. I was straight-laced, more or less, a graduate of two military schools, climbing the corporate ladder, and, well before the Alt-Right, very traditional in my political and personal outlook. Minus Matthew Murphy, the rest of the family were normie liberals. It never bothered me, at the time, I just sort of shrugged at their political opinions. Rose, the eldest daughter, got caught up in Richmond’s hipster scene of arrested development, perpetual bartending, never graduated college, and accrued massive debt. Her sister, Holly, fared just about the same. By the time we circled back in our mid-twenties, they were almost unrecognizable from my youth. They had left our small Southern town and became alien facsimiles, with strange tattoos, gauged earrings, and Holly now sounded like a Mid-Atlantic socialite from California.

I’ve never decided a friendship strictly over someone’s political opinions, and despite our divergent lifestyle choices, they were still my “sisters” and their parents were still my “parents.” Rose had fallen on hard times, from an employment perspective, and I had an opening within my department. Regardless of her inexperience in my field, I hired her for an entry-level position. To my pleasant surprise, she showed a lot of grit and grasped the new material very well. It would be an understatement to say I was simply proud of her for her professional growth. She even moved back home, escaping the cultural cesspit of Richmond, and changed her looks from a bohemian bartender to the girl next door. Holly also matured, somewhat, but she alienated herself from us with a new loser boyfriend, not much that could be done there.

It seemed that the old times had come back again. We had our mutual cook-outs, joined in on our church oyster roasts, attended my first child’s birthday parties, had fellowship at my annual Christmas party, and shared plenty of libations and laughter. It was like reuniting with close family after many, many years apart. And, you do anything for family, at least I thought. I remember spending an entire rainy Saturday cutting up two massive fallen trees in their front yard with Matthew, I ran through two STIHL chainsaws and made several trips to the landfill. Meanwhile, the girls’ boyfriends were nowhere to be found. To me, it didn’t matter. That’s what you do for family.

Lurking in the background of all this, from my professional career to my relationship with the Murphy family, were my dissident politics and those inherent risks associated with them. Needless to say, the summer of 2019 was a rough one for me, to a degree. Once you get targeted by a multimillion dollar NGO for your political writings, you have a target on your back and you’re always looking over your shoulder. In spite of all that, I still kept my job (even got promoted) and the Murphy family – but, call it borrowed time and fleeting good fortune. The house always wins and I had my own sword of Damocles hanging over my head. In a country where someone can get fired on the spot for looking at the wrong colored customer the wrong way, a guy like me isn’t even due a cigarette when facing the corporate firing squad. One minute you’re chatting with your wife about an upcoming baby shower in your office and the next thing you know you’ve got a solemn faced C-level executive accompanied by a plain clothes cop escorting you out of the building.

I always knew the job was never going to last. That didn’t really bother me, you take your lumps and move on. I was more worried about Rose, and even said so to my company executioner, as well as, a final request to take care of my team and not blame them for my, and mine alone, politics. But, out of all the fallout of being in the Dissident Right, getting doxxed, getting cyber-stalked, getting fired, etc. only one group of people abandoned me, only one. Everyone else would say, “He’s my friend, I don’t care what you have to say. Let me hear his side of the story.” Or, something along those lines. From casual friends and acquaintances to brotherly classmates to my genuine family, no one broke ranks and betrayed me to strangers on the internet or to virtue signal “Love not Hate.” All except for the Murphy family, sans Matthew.

I didn’t even get the courtesy of a phone call or text message. Instead, on the eve of my son’s baby shower (they were invited), Leah and Rose cowardly texted my wife that, “[Rick] is dead to me.” I never heard from them again. All those decades of friendship and family wiped away because of an abstraction – simply politics. I was, no doubt, both mad and upset. I used to think about the Murphy family frequently, several times per day. That scalding anger eventually cooled to an icy contempt and sobering realization that if it wasn’t this, it would have been something else down the road. In the end, loyalty to your friends and family, certainly not politics, defines you as a person.

You never really get over betrayal, especially when it’s personal. But, you can learn from it. You can learn who your real friends (and family) are, folks that will drop everything they’re doing to help you out, stick by your side, and support you. If you find just one person like that, count your lucky stars; to quote Forrest Gump, “Bubba was my best good friend, and even I know that ain’t something you can find just around the corner.”

As for traitors, they’re like cheaters – once is never enough. At some point, they’ll scheme, betray, and break faith with everyone and anyone close to them. It’s who they are. And, according to Dante, they’ve got a long row to hoe when the time comes.