We’ve been angry at one another for a long time. It’s been building since at least the 2000 election and became intense during the Obama administration. We have divided ourselves into factions. No one really asked us to, at least initially, we did that all on our own. Then a national figurehead joined in and made us choose a side. And even with the events of the past few days, I fear it’s possible to fall even further, but I hope I am wrong.
In the last couple of months I’ve been asking myself how exactly did I get here? I’ve been very angry at anyone who can’t see what I can see and that includes people I care about very much. I search for information about how to be in a relationship (romantic or friendship or family or work) with anyone who politically doesn’t think like me. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of calming elements out there that have helped me.
I didn’t understand the way that people can become so immersed in rather illogical thinking. That’s a commentary on both sides of this big fence we’ve all built. Just before the election I watched an episode of CBS Sunday Morning and they had several segments on the election. One of those segments showed the journalist asking people where they got their news, to which a fairly universal reply was “Facebook”, they had stopped reading or watching or listening to any other media. I was floored. How could this happen? Facebook is unedited, largely unmoderated opinions from crazy aunts and uncles. It’s like the digital version of the National Enquirer. My own family has reposted some of the most bizarre things. Things that can’t possibly be true based on the insanity of it, yet they believe it. One example…they all reposted a National Enquirer-like article that said flip flops sold at Walmart were poisonous and ate away at the skin they touched, it was complete with a photo. There was nothing else in any other media outlet regarding these “poison shoes” and not one single person I know had any issues or knew anyone who had any issues. It was clearly a made-up “article” designed to instill fear and my family bought into it. I don’t understand how these people, who I personally know and who have a decent amount of common sense, could believe something that was very clearly untrue. So I have told myself that having in print online and being “fed” via people we know, makes us believe things we just wouldn’t otherwise.
Then, I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix, a documentary EVERY citizen should watch, and learned a couple of things. The main thing I learned was that it is designed to feed the same, repetitive narrative to you. If I clicked on a conspiracy theory post, more would pop up in my feed. To explain how powerful this is, I was on Facebook for about seven minutes today, the first time I had opened it in about a month (good for me!). During that short time, I saw ads pop up for lingerie I had been looking at this past week. Even without being on Facebook, the coding they’ve developed tracks us constantly and feeds us things it believes we’re interested in. This is how Facebook makes money.
So, if I believe in lies, deception and fascists, it sees I am looking up those items and will hone in on them and continue to feed me that narrative. When a citizen only sees one perspective, it is easy to become brainwashed or at a minimum, sucked into, that world. These might be generally sane people but when a lie is told over, and over, and over again, and shared with us via people we know, even the most-sane of us will start to question ourselves. It’s a form of gaslighting. This is why I advocate for reading ALL information or NONE of it. I go to both CNN and Fox News because it’s important to read both slants.
When I learned this, I started to understand how it was possible that some of the people I had deemed as bat-shit crazy were really just more isolated and fed that bat-shit over anything else. This calmed me down some, except that I didn’t (and don’t) know how to change that isolation. Then I realized that it must start with me in some form. Hence, the forcing of myself to go to both cable networks listed above or avoid both equally. I needed to expand my own borders and stop isolating myself.
Yet I can’t bring myself to do it yet with those I love who think so differently. I have, I think, started to understand why they believe some of the things they do and I think that’s because they have some fears of where our country might go. I share those fears too. I don’t want to live in a socialist or fascist government. That would be the extreme ends of the Democrats and Republicans, and at those extreme ends, I don’t think that I would call them Democrats or Republicans as it doesn’t seem to actually fit the traditional definitions of either. Once I recognized that I had some fear, I could start to understand that we, as human beings and especially adults, don’t express those fears as fear, we typically express them as anger. This is because of our culture rewards aggressiveness and mocks retreat. For some (note I say some – not all) I believe their fear drives them.
I also know what it’s like to feel as if I’m not heard. This has happened at work often and it’s very frustrating. None of us want to feel invisible or unimportant. We all need to know that we matter to someone, even just one person. We all need that validation. I reached out to professional therapists to assist me with understanding myself better and work through some childhood difficulties trapping me as an adult and through that process have gained a better understanding of what it means to be heard. I also read the book “You’re Not Listening. What You’re Missing and Why It Matters” by Kate Murphy. While I didn’t agree with about 30% of the book, I did find the overall topic and discussion extremely helpful. I recommend it. Thanks to that book, I now attempt to not finish other people’s sentences. I attempt to not think about what I feel the need to say while they’re still talking. I listen. Or rather I practice listening because I’m a work in progress. I say to myself, “listen to them, they need someone to hear them too, they need to talk too, it’s not always about me”. I like the better person I think I can be by practicing that technique. However, I know I’m still a chatterbox. Like I said, I’m a work in progress.
I’m starting to see some of my mistakes and it starts with a lack of empathy or understanding for human emotions within other people. Yeah, I disagree with some of the tax laws and relief bills and unemployment benefits of the government, but those are always in flux, always changing and always should change. It’s ok that we debate them. There is no end goal there because there will never be perfect. All we can do is assess the current situation and act accordingly. I think, like so many of us, I have tried to get the “other side” to defect to mine, but that’s not likely to happen. What we need to do is listen to the other side’s perspective and ask that they listen to ours and then say “how can we find an acceptable compromise to make this work for both of us?” It’s not easy. It’s certainly not easy when only one side of that conversation is willing to listen at all and the other is still trying to convert their “enemy”. But it has to start with one person, and I can only lead by example.
But that’s where this part is hard. I don’t know how live in this divided world with the people I love the most. If it’s a friend or co-worker, I get to go home at the end of the day and they can still be my friend and co-worker. With family or a spouse it’s different for me. I equate their views over the last four years with their values. And values are something that we need to share in order to be in those relationships, right? I detest a political figure so much at this moment, equating that person’s rhetoric with some of the most evil people of modern times (the last couple hundred years), that if someone I love supports that person, I think it is a reflection of their values. I can’t quite shake this. It scares me. A lot. I either see those wonderful people as incredibly stupid, incredibly gullible or downright terrible as humans. But my gut tells me that they aren’t any of those, although we all, myself included, have moments within those categories. In some ways I’ve had to reconcile this thought in my head with the following conclusions (or temporary conclusions as I’m sure they really are).
- We live in a society that has demanded we take sides. We’ve lost our ability to discuss calmly. I know I have. So when forced to choose, we choose a side and then society won’t let us deviate from the mission of that side, even if we only align with a small portion of their agenda.
- We are misinformed – see the aforementioned social network commentary.
- We are more afraid of the unknown of the “other side’s agenda” than of the one we’ve chosen. It’s a little bit of “the devil you know…” situation.
I’m not usually the calm person in a strongly opinionated conversation. I want everyone to see it my way and agree with me. I’m just like the other millions of people in this country. But I do find that if I’m speaking with someone intelligent, calm and informed that I enjoy the conversation even if we’re on different sides of the issue. It’s the heated argument that brings in the resentment. Want an example of that? Read any comment on any internet site. People have used the anonymity of the internet to lash out and we’ve allowed ourselves to get out of control in every aspect of our speech because of it.
I am heartened by the call for bipartisanship from the most radical of some of our national leaders. I think it’s significantly beyond time for them to say these unifying statements, but in this case, I will take late over never. I will allow those I’ve vilified in my head another chance to grow as humans and admit that their staunch line-in-the-sand-outlook has been wrong, regardless of which side of that line they’ve been on. I may never agree with them and I may still think that many of them are not kind enough for the job they’ve been elected to, but I will attempt to give them another shot at correcting the course.
I feel like if I can possibly start with some of the things I’ve mentioned in this post, that perhaps I can be one person that might affect one other person, that might affect another, and so on. That’s how this is going to change. It must happen with good leadership but that leadership must be at every level. It cannot just live in our state and national government. It must be in our workplace, our community organizations our friendships and above all, it must be within our own homes even if those we love the most don’t share the same viewpoint. I’m clearly not 100% sure how to accomplish this change, but I do know that identifying the issue is the first step because that gives me the knowledge of what NEEDS to change. The rest is a process.
I know I’m not blameless, and neither are you. So on today, January 12, 2021, I’m asking that we all commit in some way to making a change within us and rebuild our community together. There are 353 days left in this year. I’d like to ring in 2022 with real joy at knowing that Americans haven’t given up one another.
