Too Human To Choose A Side

My youngest daughter and I are home from one house-sitting staycation, and with another one coming, this week was meant to be a space of rest. Time to sweep and dust, water plants, enjoy the quiet we've worked hard to cultivate in our home. Space to breathe before another summer fades into the background and a new school year begins.

But I don't feel rested. I feel drained. I feel overwhelmed by opinions as the political divide in America continues to worsen and the emotional impact of polarization makes nuanced conversation a barely-noticed casualty in the left vs right culture war. I feel heartbreak over political division that cripples our ability to balance empathy and disagreement, as opinions become weapons and the cost of cancel culture begins to include an actual death toll. Only a few years ago, we argued over the value of building bridges not walls, but now in the dangerous territory between silence and free speech, what we're building are graveyards around the monuments of true diversity in our culture. When did we forget how to choose compassion over conflict? When did we forget the power of listening across differences, even when values collide?

Maybe the most tragic cost of all of it is the way dehumanization in politics doesn’t just strip dignity from those we silence, it erodes our own. Because when anger becomes fear in disguise and disagreement justifies destruction...when we turn political burnout into political trauma...when we cease choosing humanity first regardless of party lines...we don’t just forget to see others as human—we forget to be human, too.

I froze when I saw it, stunned for a moment by how stunned I wasn't—and stunned again by a sudden depth of heartbreak that wasn't new but was surprising all the same. Maybe I should be used to it by now, the way we get used to the nuisance of mosquito bites around a campfire or waves crashing over our heads when we pit the smallness of our selves against the majesty of the ocean.

"I want for you whatever you want for immigrants." Posted without fanfare. Unpretentious. Uninhibited. Uninviting. A perfect example of what happens when social media and political outrage form storms that crack like lightning strikes, sparking flames of dissention. I lowered the screen and pushed the laptop away.

This is how politics ruins relationships, leaving us grieving lost friendships in a world where kind communication is seen as weakness and we've forgotten how to disagree without demanding destruction.

My daughter lost a friend over politics once. She was fourteen at the time, unable to vote or even fully comprehend the intricacies of the political world. A simple discussion at the lunch table, the simple voicing of an opinion, and that was it. A friendship that had previously been open, supportive, and fulfilling was mercilessly strangled to death over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And two young girls too young and too emotional for politics walked away scarred by new fear of speaking out.

I'd like to think this was the result of immaturity, and I would have liked to counsel my daughter that day with a reminder that having a political disagreement with friends doesn't have to mean the death of a friendship. But the truth is, too often it does.

I lost a friend over politics once, too—and neither of us were fourteen. We were two fully formed and functioning adults, both in committed relationships, both raising young children. We were close in age. We shared childhood memories, fears and dreams, the stresses of daily living. Through dozens of messages sent each day for well over a year, we shared financial woes, mundane moments of daily living...and his journey toward death. The thousands of miles between us dissolved into nothingness as I kept him company through the boredom of his cancer treatments—and I shared his outrage when, one afternoon as he sat on a bench outside the hospital, he coughed a few times too many.

"It was a verbal attack like I've never experienced before," he wrote, still sitting on that bench, soaking up the Canada sun as he waited for his wife to pick him up. "This woman was sitting at the other end of the bench, and she gave me the dirtiest look as she got up. And then she said, 'Yeah, go smoke another one, buddy.' But I've never smoked a day in my life!"

"She doesn't know you," I wrote back. "Did you tell her about your cancer?"

"I didn't have the chance," he told me. And then... "God, what happened to grace? We were right outside the cancer unit, and I'm skin and bones."

A few months later, a casual conversation about universal healthcare abruptly severed our friendship. He asked if I was voting for Bernie Sanders and I said no. "Oh," he said. "So I guess you want me to die."

I stared at that message in shock, eyes filling slowly with tears. He was going to die anyway, in some hospital room, surrounded by machines and bathed in the tears of a wife he had loved since they were children—and my political leanings couldn't save him even if they could suddenly cross borders. We both knew it. We had grieved his death and the unavoidable suffering of his wife and children many times. "What? Of course not," I wrote.

"I can't be friends with you anymore," he wrote back. "I don't need friends who want me dead."

He never spoke to me again. We never talked it through. And within another few months he was gone.

I’ve carried his words with me ever since, like an aching wound that won't heal. Not because they were fair, but because, for him, in those moments, they were true. He had done the work of accepting death, but grief and pain and looming mortality turned difference into danger in a flash so fast it was dizzying.

I wasn’t his enemy. But political narrative told him I was. And he believed.

And maybe that’s what hurts us all the most, both then and now. It's not the disagreement—it's the fear of an exhausted society screaming in extremes, drowning out the grace we might find on common ground. It's the way so many of us simply refuse to hold love and difference in the same hand, even as we tear each other to pieces in the names of acceptance and awareness and inclusion.

This is what polarization steals from us. The quiet space where nuance lives, and the comforting memory of shared laughter.

When we leave behind the solidarity of standing together as humans—even when we stand on opposite sides of an issue—we sacrifice the understanding that disagreement is not disloyalty, and differences in expression do not equal enmity. And most often, the true solution to the problems that grieve us all are somewhere in the middle ground no one seems willing to explore.

And this? Well, this is what we lose when we stop listening.

*****

Maybe we can’t fix everything. Maybe the world really is too loud, too angry, too divided. But I choose to believe we still have a choice. I choose to believe that every new day is a new chance to soften the edges and resist the urge to dehumanize what we don’t understand. I want so much to believe that we can still find grace when someone else’s truth collides with our own. That we still have the capacity to listen, even when it’s hard.

That’s part of why I keep showing up here. I'm not writing to stir up debate or shout into the void; I'm doing it because I don't know how to exist in a world where stories no longer matter. I know what it is to feel silenced, and the lingering pain of that silence feeds my hope that listening still matters. It’s also why I write fiction—because even when it feels like the world has forgotten how to hear each other, I get to create worlds where people still try.

STILL FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM is slowly coming along. This novel is shaping up to be one of the most personal and healing stories I’ve ever told, and I can’t wait to share it with you in March.

But until then, I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep listening. And wherever I can, I’ll keep choosing humanity over hostility—because I still believe there’s beauty to be found in the in-between. And I hope wherever you are tonight, you’ll keep choosing to...