I’m fortunate to have friends and family across the political spectrum, and I’m observing something that fascinates and terrifies me at the same time: Both sides are saying the same thing about each other. “This is a battle between good and evil.” “The future of democracy is at stake.” “(The candidate) is a fascist who will take away my rights.”
Friends, we want the same thing – we want to live a good, successful life where we can live safely and comfortably. For some reason, we have been trained over the years to demonize the other side – to blame them for all the ills we see in the world or all the perceived freedoms that have been taken away from us. As we all know, social media feeds this demonization with like-minded opinions, drowning out any logical contradiction. Then the discussion becomes much less about how we get to that “good, successful life” and more about “threatening democracy” and “taking away my rights” and so on and so forth. We are fed insults, name-calling, crowd comparisons, etc. We need to take a big step back and talk about what we all want. Let’s discuss how we get to our common denominator instead of how awful the other side is. Because as someone who knows and loves people on opposing sides, I know that they are good and reasonable people who have more in common than differences.
