I was having a conversation with my brother this morning about stupid people that annoy us as we do almost every morning (spoiler alert, it’s the entire human race) and we got on the topic of politics and how broken our world is. We then we got on to the topic of friendship and how it functions in this new, divisive world of absolutism. It made me thing of a particularly positive friendship in my life that I often find peculiar:
My relationship with Jesus Christ.
I’m just kidding. While my relationship with my savior is deeply important to me, I am also deeply uncomfortable talking about it with people on the internet, suffice to say I will leave that kind of stuff to my brother. He is much better at it than I am.
No, in truth I have several friendships with people who’s political ideologies do not line up with mine. That’s not particularly surprising, I am a young man and most people my generation consider my political leanings to be outside the norm. Most of my friends and I that believe different things let bygones be bygones and just don’t bring up politics knowing that we don’t agree so why talk about it. There is one friendship of note that is the exception though. A young man I met a while ago, for anonymity reasons lets call him Brian, no that’s a terrible idea, I know several Brians. How about…Dave…yeah I don’t any Daves.
Dave and I met some time ago and, as stated before, both of us have different political ideologies. What makes this friendship special is that, unlike the other friendships mentioned above, Dave and I are both very vocal about our politics. We chat several times a week and it’s a rare engagement when at least some version of the conversation doesn’t lean towards the political.
Now, in the world we live in today; the world of “if you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,” this kind of mix up is generally a spell for disaster. How are we not always at each other’s throats? Why aren’t we arguing and fighting over ideological differences all of the time? How do we have civil discourses on a weekly if not daily basis?
Why are we still friends?
This was the question that I thought about this morning talking with my brother. In a world of echo chambers and safe spaces, how can we be friends with people who believe differently then us? And it’s my friendship with Dave, the very thing that spawned the question, that answers it.
Dave and I started as friends because we worked at the same place. As we talked on breaks and what have you we found we both had a passion of table top roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons. As we spoke more about that, we learned more about each other and things that we didn’t have in common. His taste in music is wildly different than mine, for example. When it comes down to it though, for all of our differences, there is one reason our friendship still works. You’ve probably guessed it by now:
We have more in common than we don’t.
When I mentioned this to my brother this morning he made an interesting comment: “I wish more people got that.” And you know what, me too. My friendship with Dave is one of the most fulfilling friendships I have. And while social media and the news and various opinion piece givers tell me I should hate him and treat him like he has a mental illness for believing what he does, I don’t. Nor will I ever. I wish we would all think on that more. Stop looking for what divides us and instead what unites us.
We all want happiness. We are all Americans (I am assuming no one outside America is reading this…that feels like a safe assumption). Aren’t we all part of a family to one degree or another, and all of us want our family to be safe. Maybe we have different definitions of safe, maybe we have different definitions of family. But I’d we willing to bet that if we look close enough, we’d all discover we have more in common than we don’t.
Fantastic! This gave me the spark i needed to write my post!