Lately I find myself pining for a world in which the great and small thinkers of the day would exchange letters the size of treatises, meet in each other’s parlors and in stuffy cigar clubs to discuss their differing opinions, stand on boxes in the middle of the sidewalk to give well-rehearsed speeches about grave issues.
In other words, I pine for middle school sometimes. Middle school. Which, if you know me, should tell you a lot.
If you don’t know me, a quick recap: middle school was probably the time in my life that I most aggravated myself. I wore tight graphic tee shirts and got up early every morning to straighten my hair, and I was not interested in watching Phineas and Ferb, not even a little bit. I also had a crush on a drummer in eighth grade. A drummer. God help me.
I don’t miss middle school for those things. What I do miss is getting in fights with people. Fights!
Not fist fights. Word fights!
I swear, I don’t think I went a day without arguing with someone about some trivial or vitally important (according to us) thing.
Some things about those fights weren’t so pretty. We didn’t know precise words for our thoughts and we didn’t know as much as we thought we did about political candidates. We (I) were abrasive and sometimes close-minded and a little too ready to get angry.
But we fought, and argued, and debated, and talked. We discussed! Our lockers became French salons, the lunch table was our cigar club, our social media the sidewalk or the parchment from which we let our ideas flow freely into the world. We were bold because we were ignorant. We were steadfast because we were stubborn. We were loud because we were passionate.
Why is it that we seem to have lost this now? A cloud of compromise, of I-see-where-you’re-coming-froms, of conflict evasion seems to have descended upon us. Compromise is good in many cases. Seeing, listening, accepting that other perspectives exist is good. We learned a lot in middle school about shutting up, and we needed to.
But what happened to our willingness to engage? To respond? To fight and then apologize, not for what we believe but for maybe just being too rude in the way we expressed ourselves, if things got out of hand? To forgive because we know the person we’re talking to isn’t the only flawed human in the room?
Is there no room next to our grown-up lockers to allow this kind of fight? Can coffee shops and zoom meetings and cubicles not give us space to fence with words? Can we not be like William Seward and Abraham Lincoln and all their contemporaries who knew the power of words—able to respect each other’s minds and abilities, and willing to take up the challenge they presented?
If we are people of conviction, of passion, of intellect and empathy, arguments shouldn’t scare us. Silence should. We should be ready to engage when we hear the call, knowing the discourse isn’t what defines us–we define it.
We can be bold because of our experiences. We can be steadfast in conviction. We can speak out of our passion and the power that knowledge gives. We can do this without anger, because life has equipped us with better tools than that.
Sometimes people act like conflict is the end of the world. I’ll skate around issues I care about because I’m afraid of letting my thoughts exist next to someone else’s wildly different ones. If it comes to an argument, my friend and I will have to dramatically part ways, like two spoiled sisters in a soap opera. But conflict, though uncomfortable, is a fact of life. And while it exists we can’t just shove it under that nice Persian rug in the living room. Conflict, like fire, needs to breathe–and it can only be addressed in the open. Trying to contain it rather than quell it only causes more damage.
A fight is not the end of the world. If you’re mean, you can apologize. If you’re offended, you can call someone out. If you’re wrong you can change your mind—and if they’re wrong you can hope they might get around to admitting it.
We’re adults now. Maybe we can get over ourselves and our partisan rhetoric for a bit and just have a conversation for once—even a loud or uncomfortable conversation—like we used to when we cared too much about hairspray and who we were sitting next to on the bus.
God knows we have much more important things to care about now, and we should be talking. So let’s fight.
No comments:
Post a Comment