Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

We all agree.  It’s been a rough year for the United States.  Americans are stressed and frustrated….and angry.

From politics to masks to the politics of mask-wearing, social media is filled with angry rants.  Rants that, at the end of the day, are just one form or another of “Listen to me!  Agree with me!  I’m right!”

It’s like we have become a real-life version of the Dr. Seuss book, The Sneetches.

Masks, Covid, Presidential candidates, and everything else has a “you’re either with me or against me” mentality.  Either you agree with me 100%, or you are evil.  No middle ground.  No compassion.  No empathy.

Remember the guy in the Sneetches with the Star-On and Star-Off machines?  He manipulated the division to become a very wealthy man.  Same is true today, as people on both sides capitalize on the partisanship for wealth and power and glory.

"The Sneetches" was originally published in Redbook in 1953.  Yet, so little has changed.

We have forgotten that our nation….was founded on dissent.  We fought a war to have the freedom to oppose the King.  We wrote a Constitution that gave a legislative body of elected citizens equal power to the President.  We amended that constitution to guarantee freedom of speech.  We also spelled out that the states had the power to organize and govern independently of each other.

Of course, we think this all happened in a room full of men wearing powdered wigs congratulating each other.  However, as a college classmate reminded me, the arguments that created the Constitution were probably just as heated and foul-mouthed as the ones on Capitol Hill today.

I’m fortunate to have worked hard through high school so I had the opportunity to attend a college where dissent was part of the culture.  Listen to dissent.  Challenge it.  Defend it.  Change your mind.  Respect that not everyone is going to agree with you 100%.  That, my friends, is critical thinking. 

In order to critically think, you have to be able to listen to people who disagree with you.  You have to respect people who disagree with you.  And that’s not happening.  Instead, I see people building bubbles of people who look like them, think like them, and act like them.  They’ll embrace someone who might be different, but only as long as they fit the checklist.

You thought Mean Girls was only about teenagers…..our country is filled with cliques.

Maybe because my brain functions so differently than normal, I can’t fit in those bubbles.  I don’t have a lot of true, close, real friends.  I can’t even have a normal conversation with my family.  But that crazy brain also allows me to have wonderful, insightful, interesting conversations with people who don’t look like me or think like me or act like me.  Due to those experiences, I have something important to say:

*grabs bullhorn*

If you’re too busy demanding that people listen to you and agree with you, you’re missing out on what makes this country so wonderful.

One of the “silver linings” of the pandemic is that I’ve gotten to know my neighbors, now that we’re all at home more and walking around the neighborhood.  I had no idea how beautifully diverse my neighborhood is.  Yes, beautifully.  Since we’re sort of stuck at home, we’re out of our houses, having the conversations we need to have to strengthen our community, because we’re all part of this community.

You see, the power of our country is our diversity.  Whether it’s a diversity of genetics or a diversity of ideas, what makes the US a superpower is that we validate everyone equally.  It’s not perfect or a sunny utopia, but as we hit rough roads, we grow and change and evolve.  (Though in some cases, not as fast as we should.)

Do you watch the Olympics?  I’ve been watching the Opening Ceremonies for decades.  It’s always fun when the USA is at the end of the Parade of Nations, because we spend an hour watching the rest of the world walk in, homogeneous, formal….and then there’s USA.  All colors of the rainbow, all backgrounds, all states, just dancing and filming and waving the stars and stripes.  Unified within our diversity, and in that, being one of the most successful nations in terms of medal haul, even as other countries cheat to compete with us.  It’s one example of how diversity makes our country great.

For us to get through 2020, we need to stop sticking our fingers in our ears while screaming “I’m right” at the top of our lungs.  We need to take a breath and show a little empathy for our fellow citizens.  We need to listen, honestly listen, to understand why they disagree with us.  You can be empathic without changing your viewpoint, you know.  You might even find out that you agree on a few things.  We need to go outside our circles, our communities, to try new things and experiences—because they’re interesting, not because they’re trendy or that’s what the celebrities on social media are doing.

(I know the partisans will hit his point and point fingers at the other side.  You can start by treating politics more like a policy debate and less like a Bears/Packer playoff game.  I mean, how do you want to be seen?  A thoughtful intellectual or a drunk tailgater?)

You see, once we open ourselves to those who are different, we gain the confidence to go outside the norms and be different.  We start seeing the world through other people’s eyes—yes, empathy—and we see the creativity and innovation that is inside all of us, the creativity and innovation that might solve one of our country’s many problems, and right now, we need to support that creativity and innovation, rather than squelching it, simply because we are afraid of being “wrong.”

The truth is that in a country of 330 million people and a Constitution that guarantees freedom of belief…there are 330 million belief systems in this country.  There is no “right” or “wrong.”  There is just being and living and growing and respecting and accepting and encouraging and innovating to a place where we continue to be the superpower we are.

So stop making people fit in your box.  Stop making yourself fit into other people’s boxes.  Be you.  Be nice.  Be kind.  Respect your fellow citizens.  Encourage all forms of diversity, especially within yourself.

We’ll get through this, everyone.  Together.

The Exceptional People Biography Book Club---for Exceptional People

About five years ago, in one of my “why can’t I find a good man” phases, I came across the Extraordinary Women series on PBS.  The episode was a biography on Coco Chanel, and what struck me, as I watched, was how she struggled finding a happy, lasting relationship.  Of course, she lived in the 1920s, when women were still defined as “Mrs. Husband,” so she couldn’t be successful without a husband.

I then remembered an autobiography I read years ago about Myrna Loy.  She’s most famous for being Mrs. Nora Charles, the wife of famous detective Nick Charles (played by William Powell) in The Thin Man movie series.  I had plucked it from the library at random, but now The Thin Man is one of my favorite movies.  However, what I remember most about her autobiography was that after four marriages and four divorces, she realized that she was happiest single.  Of course, it was a lot easier to be a single woman in the 1960s when you were a Hollywood legend, but it struck me that once again, a successful, smart, independent woman….didn’t need a husband.

So why on earth was I, a career focused, independent, self-sufficient woman in the 21^st century, judging myself for not getting married and having kids?  Why did I think there was something wrong with me, instead of looking at the mirror and realizing that I was living the life that Coco Chanel and Myrna Loy and Grandma Westphal wished they could have lived?  I mean, Coco Chanel and Myrna Loy were exceptional, successful women.  Maybe my husband struggles were more a reflection of my exceptionalism instead of my failure.

Of course, it would take another bad relationship for me to truly accept that about myself, but hey, we’re all human.  And I’m GenX, the girls who were taught they could be astronauts and politicians, but also were expected to find the time to date, get married, have children, go to yoga, join a book club…..

Oh, right, book club.  After this awakening, I decided that I needed to be reading more biographies of exceptional people, and last month, I went down to Chicago to meet Adam Rippon, the hilariously funny openly gay Olympic bronze medal winning figure skater turned YouTube talk show host.  If Adam isn’t exceptional, I don’t know anyone who is.  It was a book signing for his autobiography, Beautiful on the Outside, and I brought it with me to New York as a fun read. 

That's not a photo from NYC, but it's still a good book

Adam had said during the question and answer session that he picked moments of his life that were relatable to everyone, and there were several times where I’m thinking, “wait, that happened to me.”  Maybe not hopping a subway in France to buy a shirt at H&M during a competition, but definitely the multiple hour breakup conversation.

While reading Adam’s book, I decided to challenge myself to read a biography (preferably, an autobiography) every month.  Typically, biographies are written about people with exceptional lives, and often, these exceptional people weren’t successful fitting into societial norms.  Actresses and activists, heroes and nonconformists, they remind us that it is okay to be different, that being “different” might mean being extraordinary.  And maybe, help us find that exceptional voice inside ourselves, because we are all exceptional.

Which is why I’m starting the Exceptional People Biography Book Club for Exceptional People.  Every month, I’ll post on my Instagram a short review of the biography I’ve read.  I’m also very open to suggestions of good biographies and autobiographies.  Who has inspired you?  What story moved you so much that it changed your life?  Send me a comment, email, direct message or smoke signal, and let’s all discover how each one of us is truly exceptional!