Making This Dinner Party Awkward

I’m really tired ya’ll. Of the election. You know…the one that’s 14 months away? And I know I’m not alone because people tell me all of the time that they are tired of it too. For a number of years now I’ve had this notion that there are a lot of us from across the political spectrum who may be dissatisfied with the way candidates behave during elections.

How’s that for stating the obvious?

We watch our selected news programs and read our local papers and visit our trusted websites and it is just too much to absorb sometimes. All of the words…the shouting…the sarcasm (which normally I’m a fan of, but not when we’re talking about things that affect people’s lives)…the name-calling…the vilifying. Don’t we have enough real villains without our “leaders” fabricating them?

I love language. I think there is power in words -- both in speaking and in listening. But words can hurt. Not in the same way that sticks and stones will break your bones…but in often invisible and deeply painful ways. This is true in all human relationships…among friends and family, among professional colleagues, and even among political opponents.

You can hardly turn on a 24-hour news channel without landing on a debate of some sort between two or more people with opposing views about what’s wrong with the world today:

• Guns
• Abortion
• Immigrants
• Isolationism
• Racism
• Greed
• Deterioration of the nuclear family
• Poverty
• Education
• Religion
• Lack of Religion
• Liberals
• Conservatives

Everyone is just sure they know why our society is decaying before our eyes. Someone is always ready to tell you what the one single problem is, to identify the person or persons behind it, and to destroy their humanity. And once the audience is convinced that someone is wrong about an issue because they are evil…the next logical step is that they are wrong about everything because they are inherently evil. They become dehumanized and, by extension, anyone who agrees with them somehow becomes deeply flawed as well. No longer a human counterpart in conversation…an adversary becomes “the other” – an enemy which needs to be destroyed.

Of course, I don’t accept that society is decaying before our eyes…society has always had its problems. We see more of them now because we are global and because there is infinitely more data about everything at our disposal. This can be a good thing if we are looking for problems to solve. It can also be a bad thing if we are just looking for people to blame. If there’s anything different about now as opposed to “the good old days”, it’s that we used to talk to each other more…and not in 10-second sound bytes, 140-character quips, or Internet memes…but over coffee, meals, and in our legislative assemblies.

Political memes and Twitter slogans are poison. They are not discourse. They do not paint a complete picture of any issue or any person. They never tell the whole story or adequately present the complexities of any problem that involves people. They are at best a starting point for discussion. But I don’t believe these descendants of social media intend to do any of those things anyway – their intent is to encourage division and fuel rage.

Because election cycles seem to get longer every year…for some it is perpetual… divisive and thoughtless speech has become the star – the prima donna – of the 24-hour news cycle. Every tragedy…every triumph…every seemingly benign “human interest story” is vulnerable to misappropriation, misinterpretation, and/or oversimplification by someone with an agenda.

We scarcely have time to process a world event before some gas-bag has seized it as their issue du jour, interpreted it according to their worldview, and boiled it down for us so we don’t need to process it for ourselves. Sounds helpful, doesn’t it? Except that it’s not. I don’t want a presidential candidate telling you or me what to think. Their primary motive at this stage is just maintaining relevance – not demonstrating governance.

Free airtime is their only concern and ugliness is the carrot that all the media rabbits chase hardest. All publicity is good publicity, right?

This distorted rhetoric bleeds into every area of our lives…sprinkling our news feeds, engulfing our information outlets. It consumes the news cycle until it permeates our thoughts and we begin to associate this rhetoric with the people we love -- those who may support “the other” – until they become the other too.

I hate this.

When people run for office, they do and say things about each other that are completely contrary to the things I’ve spent 14 years trying to teach my kids:

• “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” Dalai Lama
• “Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you. Listen in such a way that others love to speak to you.” (I don’t know who said it first, but I say it to myself and my kids a lot.) 
• Almost any of these quotes from the modern prophet Fred Rogers. 

And then there's this one…maybe the first and certainly one of the most important adages I remember being taught as a very young child.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

For too long now we have had a double-standard for leadership. It’s a low bar in which we overlook the tactics and rhetoric used to get elected believing that the candidate we support will somehow magically become a completely different person who speaks a completely different language once they take office.

Sure he’s saying all that stuff to woo the base, but he doesn’t actually believe it. He’ll moderate once he’s in office. 

She accepts money from those people because she needs it to run the campaign, but she’ll tell them to take a hike if they try to control her policy.

Why on Earth do we believe they will stop doing what we have shown them will get them exactly what they want? It’s like expecting a toddler to suddenly give up tantrums after we have given into them several dozen times. Of course they’re not going to change. And even if they are being something they are not or saying things they don’t really believe, why would we trust our life and liberty to someone who believes the ends justify the means?

And just exactly how do we look our kids in the face – any of the kids in our lives – and say it’s okay for our adult leaders to follow those rules…

But you need to follow the Golden Rule.

I know we can do better. And it begins by expecting better. We need a Golden Rule Brigade – a task force that calls out the meanness that is unacceptable in human relationships. We have fact-checkers…let’s have some malice-checkers. What if, as we’re keeping scorecards for how our elected leaders vote, we kept scorecards for how respectful and considerate our candidates and leaders are of one another and, by extension, of us?

It is a really tall order…expecting adults to behave as such. But if we can do better at this…if we can enter governing cycles not feeling so battered and exhausted from the election cycle…maybe we can do better on some of those other things I listed above. Because I know we can do better on all of those issues too.

But only if we do unto others....

• I’ll speak to you with kindness as I would have you speak to me with kindness.
• I’ll listen to your words as I would have you listen to mine.
• I’ll value your opinions as I would have you value mine.
• I’ll honor you as a person as I would have you honor me as a person.

I know it sounds impossible and it is if we continue to reward our politicians for pitting us against one another. But remember the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Or what about George Santayana’s definition of a fanatic? One who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim?

Can’t we do better than 14 more months of enabling fanatics with our own insanity?

I’m out. I really don’t want to be insane anymore. I want to sound the giant gong for the fanatical entertainers who refuse to leave the stage. 

And I can’t make anyone else do it, so I’ll just start with me.

The first thing I’m going to do is not repost (or even "like") acerbic memes, retweet spiteful quips, or accept 10-second sound bytes as an adequate summation of the complexities facing humanity. I’m also going to remember that the people in my life – whether they agree with me or not – are, in fact, people and not the minions of some demon fabricated for someone else’s political gain.

For me, it’s really an extension of fact-checking before I speak and/or post. It’s about always looking at “the other” as another person.

For this election season…interminable as it will be…I’ll endeavor to just stop and THINK:

Feel free to join me.