outrage is addictive

Feeling sick and sad today. Best Friends' house, the ranch, is no longer a safe and restful place to go. It's because of politics. Foremost in their minds at all times are all the things that are wrong with everything, and there's no room for anyone who has any kind of different opinion. They've become addicted to the TV shows that spew vitriol and half truths twisted out of recognition. The wonderful spirit of joy and restfulness their home used to have is gone.
They used to be God centered, their home and their minds filled with desire for God and desire to give aid and comfort in His way. Now Opinions, couched as Christianity, have filled their home with strife and rancor. And they can't get enough. Just like addicts they look for a little more each day, waking up looking for the new outrage and checking the pundits just before bed. I just want to cry.
I've had to come to a place of seeking peace in my surroundings, stress is the most draining activity and strident voices and tales of the other guy's perfidy always make me tense. There's something I've always felt that I have never heard from anyone else, that is that when I hear someone criticizing someone in a hateful way I am fully aware that I might be that other person, and the person criticizing them today is likely to be criticizing me in the same way when I'm not around tomorrow.
I have a chronic dry tickle cough, the theory of the healers is that it comes from not speaking. It's one of the reasons I started this blog, to have a place to say these things. They say one has to get over the fear of not being accepted if one speaks her mind. Well, it's not safe to speak one's mind! Not if you listen to the people around you. My opinion is often at odds with the world and my family, I've become used to this over a lifetime of always being on the wrong side in their eyes. I'm what I call and Alternate Thinker, I can almost always see both side of an argument. In a college class where I was always the one with the unpopular opinion I was called Devil's Advocate. A common phrase for one who argues the opposite side, but the inference of course is that the opposite side is evil. And I can tell you from experience that it is never safe to say what I think. Even having or choosing not to have an opinion has now made it unsafe to be around my best friend. I always thought she was my one safe place. If I told her how I feel about all of this now I would be one of the people she spends her days denegrating. Now my safe place is gone.
It's not about whether we agree or we don't agree politically, it's that I reject the world view presented us by the pundits whose job it is to keep us worked up, because outrage is addictive, and that keeps the rating high.
It's like she and her husband are ill. I treasure the friendship and will keep it in the hopes that they will recover, perhaps when the political pendulum swings back in their direction. But that means that I will have to repeatedly go to this unsafe, stressful place, where I have to keep my head down, until she tires of hatred and returns to her love of God. I have always been safe in her presence, even having turned my back on Christianity and declaring myself Undecided about God, not knowing who God is, so I thought she was not a "Party Line" Christian. Now I'm unsafe and it's not even about something real.