How I lost my mind and my voice arguing politics, and why it can't happen again

I knew I was angry, obviously. I was yelling. I struggled to find words fast enough to keep pace with my raging mind. If there had been a mirror in front of me, I would’ve seen the flashes of anger in my eyes and I may well have become frightened by my fury.

If only I’d seen a mirror maybe what I’m about to write would be a moot point. But, unfortunately, I didn’t see a mirror, so I kept on getting angrier and angrier; wilder and wilder. I knew I was mad at my friend, one of the dearest I’ve had in my life; I knew I was saying some pretty angry things to him. But it wasn’t until later, after we’d hung up, that I realized I was on the verge of losing my voice. It was hoarse — and coarse — and my throat was sore.

I walked up stairs to speak to my wife. I figured she heard me ranting and raving, and I knew I’d get the truth from her. She’d let me know what I needed to know.

“Could you hear me,” I asked.

She paused to look at me, astonished.

“Uh … yeah,” she said.

She told me that at one point she was on the phone with our adult daughter, probably discussing a home design issue, or perhaps talking about our granddaughters. Meanwhile, I was downstairs, screaming at my friend.

“She said, ‘What’s wrong with dad,’” my wife explained. “I told her you were arguing with someone.’ She just said, ‘Wow, dad is really mad.’”

Mad? I was beyond that. If I’d only been mad, well, that’d be one thing. But I … I lost my mind. And over what? A political argument that began as nothing more than a discussion. Less than a discussion, actually.

Just a question.

“Dude, are you watching this,” my friend of more than 30 years asked me earlier this week, during the U.S. House of Representatives impeachment debate. “It’s fascinating to me. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

“I think it’s ridiculous,” I said.

Here is where I’ll stop to make a sports reference, so fair warning.

After I left the newspaper business in the spring of 2015, I spent the next four summers working as a marketing communications director at an auto racing facility. We had a racing oval, a quarter-mile drag strip and a motocross park. I didn’t know much about racing before the job, but I had a sports background, so that helped. But more to my point here, at the racetrack I quickly gained a feel for what fast meant.

The dragsters always amazed me, sometimes to the point of being startled by how quickly they went from starting lights to finish line in a matter of mere seconds.

A really loud rumble, then a really fast whoosh!

Justlikehat. No time for spaces, just one enormous sound.

That’s pretty much how it happened the other day. I went from answering my phone, to plopping down in an easy chair and settling in for a chat with my friend, to a question that had more to do with history than politics.

Suddenly I went from zero to “what the (magic swear word) is wrong with you, man? You’re an idiot.”

Because I was already at race speed, I didn’t even pick up on what my friend said next.

A friendly chuckle, then, “Hey man, let’s not start using those words. I’m just taking to you.”

I kept going, like a madman. I unloaded on him with every ounce of brainpower I could muster. I’d state my point of view — or rather, I’d scream it — and he’d state his at a much lower, calmer volume.

It went back and forth like that for a long time. I’d calm down, then get ramped up again. Then I’d lower my voice and make a point, which was better received in a normal tone.

He called me “Jimbo” as in, “Hang on a second, Jimbo. We’re just talking.”

My given name is James, after my paternal grandfather. For the first decade of my life I went by Jimmy to family and friends alike, but at some point I decided Jimmy sounded too childish for me, so I asked to be known as Jim.

My grandmother continued to refer to me as Jimmy, and I wasn’t about to lay down the law with her, so she was literally “grandmothered” in to my new rule.

I wouldn’t let anyone else call me Jimmy until I met my future wife, right before we started college. I thought it was cute when she did it, and when she did it was always to be sweet to me, so she got the stamp of approval, too.

At some point, my sister-in-law also began calling me Jimmy, and she got away with it, too. But that was it! Grandmother, wife, sister-in-law. To everyone else it was Jim.

But there was a brief period of time when I went by Jimbo. It was during high school, when I worked on the school newspaper. I wrote a sports column, which included a little photo to run alongside the column. It was a picture of me in sunglasses and I was wearing a pin that read “Why Be Normal” although I doubt anyone could read it.

The picture was funky, so I decided I needed a funkier name, too. So I became “Jimbo Burton” to my friends and to the readers of the Plano Senior High School Wildcat Tales newspaper.

The “Jimbo” thing stuck with me well into college, but only to my closest friends, not for everyone. A few select roommates were allowed to use it, others weren’t.

One day, after I’d gotten married and transferred to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, I decided I wanted to work for the U of U’s student newspaper, The Daily Utah Chronicle. When I applied to work there, I submitted a couple of columns I’d written in high school.

There it was, in black-and-white, “Jimbo Burton.”

I got the job. And although I never again used “Jimbo” for my newspaper handle, my friends at The Chronicle all called me by that name.

That was a long, long time ago. A few friendships have survived, though most haven’t. To one friend in particular, I’ve never been Jim, only Jimbo. All these years later, our friendship has gone from a couple of astonishingly immature 20-somethings, to a couple of slightly more mature 50-somethings. We talk on the phone often, often about sports or about the good old days or sometimes sports in the good old days.

He has always called me Jimbo because that's what my friends call me, and he has earned the right to call me that.

I wasn’t being much of a friend when I called him an “idiot.” And I wasn’t being much of a friend when I told him he wasn’t smart enough to understand what was going on in Washington.

I wasn’t being much a friend when I not only raised my voice at him, I yelled at him with such force I nearly lost my ability to speak.

What a great friend, huh?

I suppose the question is, what led to such a blowup? What made me lose my mind so quickly?

Well, let’s see …

Perhaps because I’m a jerk.

Maybe because I’m rude.

A crappy friend?

A curmudgeon?

Maybe I’m unhinged?

I’d say in some ways all those things apply, and a whole lot more. My theory is, I had a lot simmering just below the surface, and like a dry fuse in an old western movie, something set it on fire and it was inching ever so slowly, across the railroad tracks or into a mine toward a powder keg.

That keg was packed with a lot of emotional dynamite. In that moment, the world felt like it was spinning in a different direction. Yes, so much centered around festering political tensions in the wake of the 2020 Presidential election and all the cultural strife leading up to it. As everyone else did, I had my own opinions on what was going on. My friend did, too. And our opinions did not line up.

My friend and I have always enjoyed a good debate. We’ve always been able to throw out a topic and go back and forth with it. Those topics have usually centered around sports, but not always. We’ve discussed country singer Crystal Gayle’s stunningly long, butt-length hair (he thinks it’s beautiful; I think it’s weird and very likely unsanitary); we’ve also tackled fatherhood, movies, health, journalism and religion, too.

And, of course, politics.

Each time, it was nothing more than a couple of friends wrestling with an issue. Now that I think about it, we were a lot like the old guys from the Muppets, the ones who sat in the balcony and nitpicked everything.

I just Googled their names: Statler and Waldorf.

Yes, that’s who we are, Statlet and Waldorf.

But on the particular morning in question, Statler called Waldorf looking for a debate. He saw something interesting and wanted to talk about it.

And Waldorf took it too far; he went crazy.

My friend was well aware of all I’d been through in the final months of 2019 and all of 2020. He was aware of how I’d undergone foot surgery and a painful recovery; he knew I’d lost my job in an ugly, bitter way. He knew my family lost our beloved family dog, Rudy; that I’d lost some good friends to various unexpected health issues, and lost my father at the end of July.

My friend showed up at my dad’s funeral. Although we’d spoken on the phone often, I hadn’t seen him in a while. When he showed up at the viewing that Saturday morning, he was wearing a mask — and he’d lost quite a bit of weight — and I had no idea who it was. When I finally figured it out, we laughed about it. He said he was sorry about my dad, who died within two weeks of moving up to the Salt Lake City-area from southern Utah so he could be closer to my family and me. My dad was suffering from dementia, which progressively worsened. We finally convinced my parents to move away from their home in St. George, but the moved seemed to exacerbate the dementia.

In the two weeks my parents lived together in their new care facility, my dad often had no idea where he was. He was so confused, it was unsettling for the rest of the family. I personally dealt with a lot of guilt and sadness over the move and seeing what was happening with my dad.

I was with him in the hospital after he fell and broke his leg. I stayed right there with my mom almost the entire time, and I was there in the room with my mom and sister the night my dad peacefully passed away.

Throughout the ordeal, my friend kept tabs on me, often calling during the day and night to check on my wellbeing. We play in a fantasy baseball league with several other friends from college. Unbeknownst to me, my friend sent out a message to the other guys in the league to keep my family and me in their thoughts and prayers.

He later told me, “I just wanted the other fellas to know one of us was hurting.”

My friend knew my dad, which is to say they met on a few occasions. My father liked him, and often read my friend’s sports stories on the Internet. My friend and I often discussed my dad’s health, and he frequently reminded me that I was lucky to have a father who’d lived into his 90s.

When my dad finally passed away in late July, my dear friend showed up at his funeral to pay his respects. He went to my mother and they spoke for several minutes. He was there for me, because that’s what friends do.

Unfortunately — sadly — none of that mattered to me on the morning of the blowup. None of my friend’s goodwill came to my mind as I began barking at him.

I realize how this all sounds, and my intention is not to create sympathy for myself, nor is it an attempt at self flagellation. If I’m beating myself up a little, it’s because I’m rightfully frustrated with myself for such a poor display of behavior. 

I’ll admit, I’m the kind of person who beats himself up well beyond what is probably normal, whatever that means. There is deeper meaning here, but it’s best left for another day. The point I’m trying to make here, is that I got caught up in arguing current events mixed with political theory, and I was shocked by how quickly my feelings came to a boil. Adding insult to injury, I blew up at a close friend. And why did I do this? How did I let it happen?

The most logical explanation I can come up with is that I’d spent way too much time consuming news and political “insight” through the echo chambers known as 24/7 cable news networks. Worse still, I added to the dangerous elixir with heavy doses of something best described as “social media punch,” a colorful and fragrant additive with zero sugar, zero calories, zero carbs and several thousand times more than the daily recommended dosage of closed-off, narcissistic blindness.

Now add to that recipe a great deal of emotional strife all packed into a period of a little more than a year, encompassing the entire 2020 calendar, which as we all know was a Stephen King novel mixed with an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Going against what I know of human nature in this modern era, I decided to get introspective and take a closer look at myself and the factors that led to my rather abhorrent behavior. It was not an easy process, but I learned some important lessons, not the least of which is a renewed understanding of the importance of interpersonal relationships and the need for connection in a sea of disconnection.

I recommend this process to anyone who has found themselves in a similar situation. But I warn you, it’s the kind of heady undertaking that may threaten to change your life. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, I assure you; but I’m certain that if more people attempt this endeavor, the world will become a better, friendly and far less angry place … regardless of political viewpoint.