Sunday Musings Regarding the United States, Division, and the Upcoming Election

It’s been awhile since I last wrote one of these Sunday Musings posts, so I thought it was time for another. Enjoy!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the United States came to be so divided. (The idea that we’re supposed to be united despite our divisions and differences really seems to have gotten lost beside the wayside, lately.) And the only thing I can come up with is, some people — maybe the vast majority of people — want to believe in their own version of reality.

Now, you might be asking, “Barb, what the Hell are you on about this time?”

It’s simple, really. Most people, whether their politics are conservative or liberal, want to believe whatever it is that makes them feel the best about themselves and their circumstances. So whatever narrative they see has a great deal to do with their own lives, and nothing else need apply.

Should it be this way?

I’d like to say no. Because facts are what they are, and you can’t choose to only believe some facts rather than others. And optimally, everyone should do a good deal of research into political candidates — almost the same as if you’re vetting a personal friend for a job you’re not sure they’re up for, but want them to try for anyway.

The thing is, here in the United States, and perhaps around the world as well, there are many people working more than one job. Or they are working way more than forty hours at the one job they have, to support their families.

In other words, they are exhausted, and they don’t have time to do the research if they wanted to. So they pick whomever they think they can hate the least, and call it a day.

While I understand exhaustion quite well — having fibromyalgia as I do, that comes with the territory — I still wish people would challenge their own assumptions more often. Because that way, it’s easier to get out of ruts; in fact, if you do challenge your own assumptions regularly, you may never fall into a rut at all.

I also wish that we could somehow get back to where we were ten or fifteen years ago, where people didn’t choose their friends solely by whether or not they fit their political beliefs. There are so many things that unite us that it pains me to see unnecessary divisions making things worse.

It’s almost like people thought after 2008, when Barack Obama was elected, that everything would now be wonderful. (You may remember that I conscientiously objected at the time to that point of view.) And because it didn’t happen, they grew disenchanted with anyone who still wanted to see hope in any form.

Yet somehow, we went from the cult of personality that Barack Obama had about him to the cult of personality that Donald Trump now embodies. And we went from “Yes, we can!” to “Hell no, we can’t!”

What I would like to see, going forward, is that we all realize we have more in common with each other than not. We want safe streets. Good quality, affordable health care. Schools that do more than just warehouse kids, and actually teach them usable skills. And I’d like to see us have a dialogue that shows we’re paying attention to one another, rather than just dismissing everything the other side (or sometimes, sides) says out of hand because it doesn’t automatically fit our worldview.

That said, some things are flat-out wrong. Racism is one of them. Sexism is another. Unnecessary fear regarding the LGBTQ community is another.

But you know what is the most wrong of all? Stupidity.

So I urge you, today, to reach out to your friends, neighbors, and others. Try to see where you have things in common. Do good things for one another, if you can. Or at least listen and care if you can’t.

Regardless of who you vote for, you need to start looking to re-form a community around yourself. So we can all feel like we matter, and are important.

That’s what being a citizen of the greatest nation on Earth is supposed to be about, rather than “us vs. them.”

A Writer’s Meditation: Can People Change?

This is one of my more experimental blog posts. I hope you find it useful.

People change in stories. I love that about writing.

In fact, if there is no change at all in a story, there is no story. So you’d better have change, you’d better account for the change, and you’d better understand just what change is going to do if you’re writing a story.

But in real life, it’s a lot murkier.

For years on end, it seems like people don’t change at all. For good or bad, their situations stay the same. (Though the way you approach your situation can indeed change, as if you’re changing the lens on a camera to get sharper emphasis, the actual mess you’re in stays the same day after day, year after year.) And it makes it harder to explain their stories, because a steady state does not — in general — tell a compelling story.

Now, someone else telling you the story of your life as they see it may indeed be compelling. That’s because they hit the high points. They usually skip the low points, or maybe make those low points into something that turned into grist for the mill and self-improvement galore. (And as I’ve said before, it’s all grist for the mill.)

But how you see yourself? How you see the folks around you that you’re closest to? How you see the situations you tend to be in, and what you do about them, and what happens after you’ve done (or not done) those things?

In general, we tend to see sameness in ourselves. Because we want to recognize who we are, cradle to grave; we want to know exactly why we’re doing what we are, even when sometimes that’s impossible; we don’t want to live lives without meaning and resonance and value.

That’s sensible, too. It’s a good evolutionary strategy.

But it messes with the thought of change. Because we all do change in our lives. We learn things. We improve, or sometimes don’t; we take the experiences we’ve had, and use them as a way to give the framework of our lives more meaning, more value, and more understanding.

Or at least, we should do this if we’re smart.

But it’s hard. So hard, it’s much easier to explain when someone else has changed, rather than recognizing it in and of your own self.

And recognizing you need new and different experiences for self-growth and actualization is even harder, sometimes, because it feels like a betrayal of the self and a loss of the framework of the person you thought you knew.

Ultimately, I think change is going to happen. But it depends on how much you “lean in” to it versus opposing it at every turn. And it’s conditional upon understanding that you, yourself, are still a work-in-progress…

My view, in summation, is that people do change. But they don’t always recognize it. And when they do recognize it, sometimes, they don’t like it very much.

The good thing about that? When you realize you don’t like something, you can change it to better fit yourself, your values, and your goals. Or at least you can change the way you look at it, in order to find more peace with what you’re dealing with and less stress.

Thoughts on Regret

Over the course of my life, there are things I wish I could’ve done differently. I regret these things, and yet, if I had them to do over again — and didn’t have the additional knowledge of hindsight, of course — I almost certainly would do the exact same things in the exact, same order.

I wrestle, often, with the idea that no matter what I do, it’s not going to be enough. And I regret, often, that I can’t do any better than this…(even though this is the absolute best I’ve got, and I know it.)

I regret when I’ve lost friends I truly care about, all because they’ve misunderstood me or I’ve misunderstood them. Sometimes there is no way back to being friendly, either, and that just makes me so frustrated, I have no words to describe it.

I’ve thought long and hard about the idea of regret, and have only come up with one conclusion.

I seem to regret so many things because I somehow,  in defiance of all logic, believe I should’ve done everything absolutely right, every time. And while wanting  of that is understandable, not to mention very human, it isn’t possible.

And I do know better than that.

I know we can’t control things beyond ourselves. We can’t control other people. We can’t control their actions. We can’t make them do anything.

(Nor would I want to control anyone but myself, either. That would not only be boring, it would be utterly pointless, and take all the joy out of living. But I digress.)

Anyway, if you are dealing with a lot of regret in your life right now, you need to remember two things.

• One, you aren’t a bad person.
• Two, you are almost certainly on the cusp of positive change, even if you can’t see it right now.

One final thing: as a writer, I believe that all experiences are necessary to write good stories that ring emotionally true and have depth…so even the worst experiences (and I have a bundle of those) can be transmuted into something much better. I hope knowing that makes it slightly easier to deal with the bad days, in the hope that good days will come again.

What do you think about regrets, or this blog in particular? Let me know in the comments!