With Friends Like These

Little Big Man (1970), starring Dustin Hoffman, is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is a western set in the American Great Plains during the decades immediately following the U.S. Civil War. In it, a family of white settlers is ambushed and massacred by rogue Indians, leaving a surviving young boy and his elder sister orphaned and abandoned on the open plain. A little while later, a Cheyenne warrior happens upon the carnage, finds the two, and brings them to his camp. They are treated well, but the big sister escapes in the night, leaving little Jack Crabtree alone with his hosts. The Cheyenne adopt him as one of their own, training him as a fellow Cheyenne. Jack’s identity becomes one with them, but they find themselves sucked into warfare with the U.S. Army, which is attempting to push the Indians into reservations in order to clear more land for white settlement. In this context, Jack and a fellow Cheyenne youth are out in the woods one day when they are attacked by an Indian from a tribe that has allied itself against the Cheyenne and with the whites. This Indian is about to kill Jack when he notices that, underneath the makeup, Jack is white. Suddenly, the attacker is very obsequious and friendly to Jack. He runs over to Jack’s groggy comrade, raises his knife, and tells Jack that he will kill that bad Indian (because he wants to be a friend of the white man). Jack then proceeds to shoot an arrow through him, killing him and saving his true friend. Jack henceforth is given the name “Little Big Man”, and the story goes on from there.

That segment from Little Big Man is one example of people who represent themselves as friends doing harm, either intentionally or unintentionally, in the name of that friendship. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, which I’ve just finished reading recently, contains another example of the adage, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” A physician who has just moved to a new house with his family makes friends with an elderly man from across the street. There is no confusion that their friendship is real; nevertheless, that neighbor drags (unintentionally) the good doctor into a troublesome mess (I don’t want to give away the story).

In the political world, sometimes a politician may get support from an unwelcome source. I remember when Ronald Reagan, just before his election to the Presidency, received the Ku Klux Klan’s endorsement (which he immediately rejected). On the international level, the U.S. keeps touting its friendship with countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, although they are the sources of a great percentage of the Al-Qaeda membership. And I don’t believe that the U.S. has been a very good friend in the past toward some of its Latin American neighbors, having supported military coups against democratically elected leaders as well as, in my opinion, hurting countries like Colombia and Bolivia with our “war on drugs”.

On a more personal level, it’s always good to have friends! But, still, we should be able to place certain boundaries around ourselves that we feel we have the right to expect others to respect. One such violator of this principle is someone who takes some offhand comment I make (or simply discerns my apparent feeling about something) and then goes around behind my back (without my knowledge) and tries to “fix things” with others. Some friend, right? People who go around like this behind my back may think they have “my back”, but I just want them to “back off”. Let me be responsible for my own problems, and if I need help, then I am competent enough to reach out to the appropriate parties myself! Another example of a “friend” who oversteps boundaries is one who applies their own standards in some area to me and then chastises me for not living up to them. What is it that Michael Stipe sang in that classic REM song? “Oh, life is bigger, it’s bigger than you, and you are not me…” An extension of this is the person who thinks in terms of hierarchy and that we all need to “move up” to the highest level we can reach. So someone like this who is “up there” in an organization or maybe in a more prestigious (to them) profession may berate me (as a friend, of course), for not being as good as them (since their sense of personal worth is tied up with their perceived status and position). I don’t need friends like these.

Having said this, I recognize that nobody’s perfect and we all stumble a bit trying to be each other’s friends. It’s important to maintain a feeling of good will with others, at least up to a point. As Max Ehrmann’s poem Desiderata says, “As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.” But all in all, I think that if people showed a little more respect toward each other and a little less condescension, then the friendships between them would carry more substance.