Does it seem to you that there’s no real conversation anymore? People stick with like people or just go straight to social media or just ignore others all the time. It’s rare to see a big table of friends in the evening eating, drinking, laughing, and sharing their life’s experiences with each other. But you see everyday people sitting alone in Starbucks or Panera with a laptop and smartphone that they’re glued to.
It bugs me that people prefer to send texts more than to making a phone call. Just in practicality, making a phone call would be much better: you can “say” the same thing you’re going to text so much faster. Why not just call? After all, it’s hard for the person on the other end to understand your state-of-mind in a text. That’s pretty easy to do on a call.
Our social discourse has just changed. It’s changed in every way. It may have started at Starbucks, but it’s found its way into our homes. And it’s changing the way we treat each other: husband with a wife and vice versa, parents to kids and kids to their parents, and all in discourse with their friends, fellow workers, and even extended family members. And it’s not a good change.
I think what is happening in social media and satellite television and the internet have become the replacements in our lives for personal interactions — especially between parents and children. Diversions multiply in number almost daily.
When we were kids, we played in the dirt, grabbed a beat-up baseball and bat and marked off bases and home plate in the dirt and played a pickup game of baseball every day! We put clothespins on playing cards on our bicycle spokes to make it sound like a motor scooter and were inseparable from our “buds.” When the sun went away and we had to go home, Mom had dinner prepared to die for already set at the dinner table. We as a family sat around that table, recounted the day’s dramas, and talked about whatever was on the television on those only three channels: NBC, CBS, and ABC. And our parents’ politics were our politics. Why? We didn’t know any other.
Who would ever think we’d get cross with our parents after we left home, got educated, and found out how little our parents knew about the “real” world that we lived in. It’s funny how the older kids get how much smarter their parents get.
But kids today get their social interactions, social skills, and politics from social media. Forget about Mom and Dad — they know nothing! And for this generation, Cuomo, Cooper, Colbert, and JayZ have all the political perspective kids need to know everything about politics. Mom and Dad are really stupid on that topic.
Pause for a second and read the following letter written by one of those “kids” about his father to a social columnist. the short letter will certainly resonate with you. The response may turn on a lightbulb in your head.
Hi,
I’m writing because I just can’t deal with my father anymore. He’s a 65-year-old super right-wing conservative who has basically turned into a total asshole intent on ruining our relationship and our planet with his politics. I’m more or less a liberal democrat with very progressive values and I know that people like my dad are going to destroy us all. I don’t have any good times with him anymore. All we do is argue. When I try to spend time with him without talking politics or discussing any current events, there’s still an underlying tension that makes it really uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong, I love him no matter what, but how do I explain to him that his politics are turning him into a monster, destroying the environment, and pushing away the people who care about him?
Thanks for your help,
Son of A Right-Winger
Dear Son of A Right-Winger,
Go back and read the opening sentences of your letter. Read them again. Then read the rest of your letter. Then read it again. Try to find a single instance where you referred to your dad as a human being, a person, or a man. There isn’t one. You’ve reduced your father — the person who created you — to a set of beliefs and political views and how it relates to you. And you don’t consider your dad a person of his own standing — he’s just “your dad.” You’ve also reduced yourself to a set of opposing views and reduced your relationship with him to a fight between the two. The humanity has been reduced to nothingness and all that’s left in its place is an argument that can never really be won. And even if one side did win, it probably wouldn’t satisfy the deeper desire to be in a state of inflamed passionate conflict.
The world isn’t being destroyed by democrats or republicans, red or blue, liberal or conservative, religious or atheist — the world is being destroyed by one side believing the other side is destroying the world. The world is being hurt and damaged by one group of people believing they’re truly better people than the others who think differently. The world officially ends when we let our beliefs conquer love. We must not let this happen.
At its best, politics is able to organize extremely complex world views into manageable and communicable systems so they can be grappled with and studied abstractly. But even the noblest efforts to organize the world are essentially futile. The best we can usually achieve is a crude and messy map of life from one particular vantage point, featuring a few grids, bullet points, and sketches of its various aspects and landmarks. Anything as infinitely complex as life, reality, and the human experience can never be summed up or organized in a definitive system, especially one based on “left or right,” “A or B,” “us or them.” This is the fatal flaw of binary thinking in general. However, this flaw isn’t just ignored, it’s also embraced, amplified, and deliberately used as a weapon on the very people who think it’s benefiting their way of thinking.
Human beings crave order and simplicity. We cling to the hope that someday if we really refine our world view and beliefs, we can actually find the fully correct way to think — the absolute truth and final side to stand on. People and systems craving power take advantage of this desire and pit us against each other using a “this or that” mentality. The point is to create unrest, disagreement, resentment, and anger — a population constantly at war with itself, each side deeply believing that the other is not just wrong, but also a sincere threat to their very way of life and survival. This creates constant anxiety and distraction — the perfect conditions for oppression. The goal of this sort of politics is to keep people held down and mesmerized by a persistent parade of seemingly life-or-death debates, each one worth all of our emotional energy and primal passion.
But the truth is, the world has always been and always will be on the brink of destruction. And what keeps it from actually imploding is our love for life and our deep-seated desire not to die. Our love for our own life is inextricably connected to our love of all life and the miracle of this phenomenon we call “the world.” We must give all of ourselves credit every day for keeping things going. It’s an incredible achievement to exist at all.
So we must protect and respect each other, no matter how hard it feels. No matter how wrong someone else may seem to us, they are still human. No matter how bad someone may appear, they are truly no worse than us. Our beliefs and behavior don’t make us fundamentally better than others, no matter how satisfying it is to believe otherwise. We must be tireless in our efforts to see things from the point of view we most disagree with. We must make endless efforts to try and understand the people we least relate to. And we must at all times force ourselves to love the people we dislike the most. Not because it’s nice or because they deserve it, but because our own sanity and survival depends on it. And if we do find ourselves pushed into a corner where we must kill others in order to survive, we must fully accept that we are killing people just as fully human as ourselves, and not some evil abstract creatures.
Love your dad because he’s your father, because he made you, because he thinks for himself, and most of all because he is a person. Have the strength to doubt and question what you believe as easily as you’re so quick to doubt his beliefs. Live with a truly open mind — the kind of open mind that even questions the idea of an open mind. Don’t feel the need to always pick a side. And if you do pick a side, pick the side of love. It remains our only real hope for survival and has more power to save us than any other belief we could ever cling to.
Summary
In closing, I need to say this: “Naaay…he said it all.”
!