I have never once changed someone’s mind in a comment section or political argument.
I have, however, lost an entire Tuesday evening trying.
If you have been anywhere near a screen, a dinner table, a team meeting, a client lunch or a group text lately, you may have noticed the temperature. It is election week. The country feels like it is split down the middle, and both halves are fairly sure the other half has lost its mind.
Here is the part I keep bumping into. Roughly half of us are about to be disappointed. Not mildly. Deeply. And the other half will be relieved, and will try very hard not to gloat, and will mostly fail.
And then it will be Wednesday. We will still have to run the meeting. Still take the client call. Still love the opinionated brother-in-law.
So I have been asking myself a question that is not about who wins.
How do we stay kind this week, keep our light on, and not give up one inch of what we actually believe?
Because I do not think the answer is “care less.” I’ve tried caring less…and it lasted about eleven minutes.
The part we were hoping nobody would say out loud
Most of us are quietly certain we are the reasonable ones.
I know this because I am also quietly certain I am the reasonable one. And I have a feeling the woman I muted last Thursday feels the same way about herself.
A research team asked Americans to guess what people on the other side actually believe. Then they asked the other side the same question. We were wrong…in BOTH directions. We assumed far more of “them” held extreme views than they actually do.
The detail that got me was this. The people who followed the news most closely guessed the worst.
Read that again. The more news we watch, the less accurately we see each other.
So the picture in our heads of “the other side” might just be news highlight reel. The loudest ten percent, on a loop, with music. Meanwhile the actual person across the conference table mostly wants:
- A safer neighborhood
- A budget they can manage comfortably and still have a life
- for their kids to be okay
Same as us.
A man in 1911 had some thoughts about politicians
I went back to Wallace Wattles this week, the fellow who wrote The Science of Being Great more than a century ago.
He wrote, and I am quoting here, that “our politicians are a petty lot.”
In 1911.
So if you were hoping this was a new problem, I’m sorry to report it is not. People have been exhausted and frustrated by the people in charge for as long as there have been people in charge.
But that is not what Wattles was actually getting at. He was not whining. He was pointing somewhere else. He said we have “nothing to keep right but ourselves.” and that “no combination of circumstances can keep us down” if we keep the right attitude.
He also had this stubborn habit of saying “all’s right with the world.” He didn’t say it was finished or perfect. He said “Right, and still being built.” He looked at the strikes and the trusts and the mess of his own time and saw a world in mid-construction, not a world falling apart.
I’ll be honest, some weeks I can only hold that perspective for about a minute. But I keep coming back to it, because the alternative is handing my peace to a group of people who, by Wattle’s own account, were a “petty lot” a hundred years ago and have not sent word that anything has changed.
Here is how I have come to say it to myself.
Our good was never on the ballot.
Who sits in which chair may change what is harder or easier for a while. It doesn’t change what we are made of, what we are capable of, or who we get to be on Wednesday morning. The Power breathing you is greater than any circumstance, situation, or condition. I believe that, and I believe it the day after an election too.
You cannot shovel out darkness
There is a line that makes the rounds every so often. It says, “There is no such thing as darkness. There is only light, and the absence of it.”
You cannot scoop darkness out of a room. You cannot argue it out. You cannot shame it out. You can only turn on a light.
Dr. King said it better than anyone: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
I think this may be the whole answer.
When I am furious at “the other side,” it doesn’t feel like a presence. It feels like a hole. Like something is missing. And if I’m being honest about what is missing, it’s usually not information. It’s love, warmth and the willingness to see a person instead of a position.
The negativity we are swimming in this week may not be a force we have to defeat. It may just be an absence we get to fill.
That is a very different job. Fighting darkness is exhausting and you never win. Bringing light is small, it’s repeatable, and it’s oddly fun.
When our convictions turn the lights off
I want to be careful here, because I’m not asking anyone to believe less in their point of view.
Our convictions are not the problem. I have mine and I am keeping them, thank you. The problem is when conviction quietly turns into scorekeeping, and scorekeeping turns into a kind of blindness.
It shows up at work before it shows up anywhere else. The conference call, the appointment, the Zoom with the vendor, the front desk, or on the sales floor. Basically it becomes really noticeable anywhere two people have to work to get something done together.
- The client whose car has the sticker, and we decide in the parking lot what kind of person they are.
- The vendor who posted something on social media, and now every email from her reads as hostile.
- The woman on our team who wears the shirt and we have quietly stopped putting her on the good projects.
We think we are seeing everything clearly, but we might just be seeing one thing, very brightly, and nothing around it.
The sneaky part is that it feels like integrity. Like we’re standing firm on our principles and patriotism without compromise. But if our “standing firm” means we can no longer see the human in front of us, the “lights” are off, and we are the ones who turned flipped the light switch.
I’ve done this – and you probably have too…sorted a whole roomful of people by a bumper sticker and missed the one right in front of you who was about to become a friend.
So what do we do with this?
No side-switching or pretending we don’t care about the election results. Just three small places to begin.
- Keep your conviction, but drop the scorecard. Say it plainly, to ourselves, before the week gets loud: My good is not on the ballot. Then act like it. Vote, speak, care, do the thing. And then let the result be the result, without letting it decide who we get to be.
- Find the one thing in common that they want, too. There is always something. A safe neighborhood. A fair shake in life. The opportunity to succeed. We don’t have to agree on the road to notice that we’re headed for the same town.
- Shine on purpose, at someone whose yard sign we don’t like. No lecture, no comments, no not-so-subtle hints to prove our point. Just one kind act aimed deliberately at a person we have been judging. Then watch what happens to the “hole” in our hearts.
None of this requires anyone to agree with us first. It only requires us to turn the light so we can see who is actually there.
Wednesday morning
Half of us will be disappointed this week. Maybe you. Maybe me.
Disappointment is allowed. Grief is allowed. Shutting off the news and muting the group chat is, frankly, encouraged.
But I would love for us to come back to this. Change has never once arrived neatly. Every real transformation I have ever been part of, in a life or a business or a family, came through a stretch that looked like total chaos from the inside. The mess is not proof that it is broken. Sometimes it’s just proof that things are moving.
So here is the question I am asking us to pay attention to: Where exactly is our light in all of this?
Not our opinion. Our light.
If this week has you feeling further disconnected from people in your life, or further from yourself than you would like to be, know you are not alone. We’re all in this together, regardless of where our political opinions are. We’re on the same road, we just might have different maps to take us there.
