The ol’ social media feed is full of political malarky, friends on both sides of the aisle posting or reposting one or the other party’s talking points and “gotcha” memes that set up straw men and shoot them down or otherwise distort the other side’s positions.
I am going through a healing season, seeing friends and family, writing books and composing songs, and growing a relationship with someone who is filling a hole in my life after an unbearable loss two years go. I wonder how other friends and family are doing, and so I look on social media.
But some mornings I seem to have walked into a bar where the drunken patrons have decided to brawl with one another over whether to eat their toast butter side up or butter side down.
It really can be that Seussical some days. Everyone wants to feed the poor and protect the vulnerable, everyone wants to remove violent criminals from polite society, everyone wants money to be spent frugally and sensibly, but it seems people with different ideas about how to do that are downright evil.
I’m trying to believe these are still the reasonable people I know and love, but the ferocity makes me wonder if they have somehow taken leave of their senses. My Facebook Memories remind me that this kind of barroom brawl has been ongoing for more than a decade, but the intensity has increased to the point where there’s an illusion that the butter side uppers and the butter side downers have encamped in two separate countries occupying the same territory.
And yet these are still the same friends and neighbors who have borne me no ill will personally — they just have allowed themselves to be riled up over unknown, faceless and nameless “others” who they imagine are not like their neighbors.
Except we all are neighbors on this little planet of ours, and it behooves us not just to get along but to love one another.
I am going to sit in this corner and contemplate what is good and pure and excellent. I am going to seek out kindness and peace and understanding. It’s hard to ignore the petty bickering, especially when the bickerers insist they are not being petty but simply trying to raise the alarm over existential evils. I’m not sure they even understand what existentialism is.
Nonetheless I will try. I bear no ill will toward anyone, and to those who bear me ill will because my political beliefs are different from theirs, I will try to offer a smile and a hand of peace with assurance that I am not the demon they imagine. And I will try to stifle the urge to throw the next punch in the bar fight, because the most I can hope to gain that way is a bloody nose.
