I don’t know about you but I’m tired. Bone tired.

I’m tired of a chaotic news cycle that can barely keep up with the headlines.

I’m tired of rhetoric being used to tear us apart and turn us against each other.

It has worked.

‘Trumper! Snowflake! Right Winger! Libs! Mainstream Media! Virtue signaling!’

Condescension is king.

I’m tired of families torn apart by who they do or don’t support.

Don’t you remember?

It wasn’t that long ago we would go entire weeks without much of anything newsworthy happening. You know what we did then?

We lived.

Worked our jobs. Paid our bills. Talked on the phone to our families and friends. Went out to eat, maybe. Tried to exercise. Watched some junk TV. Read about a celebrity couple splitting up. Helped the kids with homework.

Went to watch their game and while we were there, chatted with friends about nothing, really.

I miss ho-hum so much I could weep.

We had room in our brains for something besides this toxic soup we’re all in. Have no doubt, we are all in it.

Some of us swan dived into it. Some of us jumped, while others were pushed from the side, and the rest of us thought we were just going for a short swim and years later here we are, exhausted and treading, stuck in the world’s worst real episode of ‘Lost.’

We are Lost to each other.

We savage one another, aiming to draw blood, to sucker punch, to triumph at any cost. We cannot possibly be wrong nor can that jackweed possibly be right.

We will never see their side of things and they will never see ours. We can’t agree to disagree because everything is at stake, our very democracy, and all will be lost if the other side wins. Logic tells us we can’t both be right, but we abandoned logic eons ago.

Aren’t you tired, yet? I am.

We are tribal in a frightening hoot-and-holler-and-dance-around-a-fire-at-night way.

Lord have mercy. I’m not joking. Lord please have mercy on us for straying so far from your message of love for the stranger, compassion for each other, humility in the way we conduct ourselves.

Ask yourself, did you always police your friends on social media? Did you always dislike other people so intensely for not supporting who you support? Did you end relationships before, because your friends or family were democrats or republicans or conservatives or liberals?

Everything is fraught these days. A harmless conversation could go south at any second. One friend told me she avoids talking to people anymore for this reason.

Let that sit for a moment.

When you were growing up, is this how you envisioned life, that you would inhabit a narrow strip of moral high ground sandwiched between two warring sides?

Me either.

We have taken something as complex and messy and sacred as the human experience and reduced it to this.
We came all this way to revert to caveman-group-think, ‘me no like them because they no think like me.’

How asinine.

We are creating our own homogenous tribes, living in our echo chambers, patting each other on the back, propping each other up, only validated by voices and people who look and sound like us.

Outside that bubble, if I pass you in an aisle at the grocery store, I’m wondering what happened to you because you used to be a rational, good person. And you are thinking the same of me.

There is no way to grow inside a bubble.

We, and I mean a big WE have forgotten an essential part of being human–the part of being in community with people who don’t think, look,or live like us.I’ve learned the most in my life from people who are nothing like me,whose life experience and outlook is different than mine.

This is critical to the soul’s journey. It’s how we learn empathy and compassion and mercy. It’s how we grow and become better, more loving people.

Instead, we have pulled further away from each other.

COVID-19 has done it physically. Politics has done it emotionally and psychologically.

I am so weary. And sad.

I’m willing to bet you have fewer friends right now than before.

I do.

Are you happier with fewer friends? Happier judging and being angry at people? Happier in your insular kingdom of ‘rightness?’

Same here.

We have forgotten the most important thing –

WE ARE ALL WE HAVE.

There is nothing that can fill the hole left by losing each other.

A political ideology cannot laugh or cry or rejoice with you, cannot comfort you through an illness/divorce/average crap day, cannot listen to all your worries and remind you things will be okay...

...cannot hold your hand or wrap its arms around you and tell you it loves you -- cannot grow old with you.

Yet, that is what we are choosing – party over people.

We have been duped.

As things stand right now, this is what we are guaranteed:

Regardless of who wins, we all lose.

We already have.