Finding Peace In A Painfully Divided World

My dad loved to passionately debate politics with me, and I hated every minute. He’d get loud. He’d get aggressive. He’d ask questions only to interrupt before I had two words out in response. It super sucked and I left every one of those debates with something ugly vibrating in the middle of my stomach. How could a guy I knew to be so great and smart and loving turn into such a bully? It’s only years later that I can see that I never debated my dad — not even once. I debated his suffering.

I Believe What I Have Been Conditioned To Believe

I know that principles aren’t innate, that what may appear to me like an objective moral imperative is really just the output from a lifetime’s worth of conditioning. From my earliest days, I learned what to value and what to avoid. I learned what will keep me safe, what will make me happy, and what it means to live a good life. Throughout, I become strongly attached to those things that support what I’ve come to know as my principles, and equally averse to anything that dare oppose them.

When outside words or actions threaten my most deeply ingrained convictions (or support something I’ve learned to despise), they don’t just threaten my values, they threaten my very identity. My core beliefs boil over, producing thoughts that can be wildly defensive and drive feelings that are palpable and primordial. Oppressive anxiety, bitter frustration, and resigned disillusionment can rule my very being, and words threaten to explode from my mouth (or onto social media) like angry bees from a kicked hive.

In other words, when my beliefs are challenged, the very center of who I am is challenged, and I’ll suffer at great lengths to defend it until the threat is overcome, just like my dad, and just like every human being everywhere and every when.

I have only three enemies. My favorite enemy, the one most easily influenced for the better, is the British Empire. My second enemy the Indian people, is far more difficult. But my most formidable opponent is a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. With him I seem to have very little influence.

— Mohandas K. Gandhi

Seeing the Person Under The Suffering

If I look closely, though, I can see the person underneath all of that conditioning and suffering. I can strip it away and see that underneath even their most sacred values is someone who looks not just “kinda” like me, but exactly like me. In fact, I see myself.

I see a human being who wants exactly what I want: to be safe, to live in peace, to know and experience love, and to help those closest to them to do the same. In engaging with them, I can start by connecting with these powerful aspects that are shared between us, instead of clashing with the topical details that can be so vastly different. I can feel compassion for the parts within them that suffer, even though those parts might drive actions that I find objectionable or even harmful. While the details will eventually need to be part of any meaningful exchange towards improving our current world (or accounting for past harm), they are never the predominant focus of my relationship with them.

Hippies create police and police create hippies. You can only protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.

— Ram Dass

It Takes Two To Tango, But Only One To Stop Tangoing

Towards the end of my dad’s life, I used to experiment with this. Regardless of what he said, I chose to remember the incredible guy I loved under his inflammatory words, understanding that he was only using me as a safe target to express threats he felt towards a comfortable way of life that seemed to be falling away from him. I can’t say that I ever “won” an argument with this approach, but by then it was no longer about winning, anyway. Without my fuel to add to his spark, his otherwise heated words cooled to shared questions about life, and then eventually to a sort of quiet calm.

Experimenting further, when I’ve encountered others supporting issues that I’m diametrically opposed to, I’ve found that I no longer feel sick to my stomach, dispirited, or the need to fight to the death. I don’t see them as assholes or villains anymore, I see them as me — fundamentally wanting the exact same stuff and scared at the thought of it being taken away. While this may not resolve our differences, it at least puts us in the same boat together. In some circumstances, this just might be enough (it was with my dad). When it isn’t, though, then maybe it’s at least a good place from which to start.

Let no one deceive another
or despise anyone anywhere,
or through anger or irritation
wish for another to suffer.

Just as with her own life
A mother shields from hurt
Her own child, her only child,
May all-embracing thoughts
For all beings be yours.

— The Buddha’s Words on Loving Kindness (The Karaniya Metta Sutta, excerpt)