How is this even happening?

Do things that happen in real life often confuse you…

Do you find yourself often asking, “How is this real?”

If so, I strongly encourage you to truly consider a few things:

1. How and where do you consume your news and gather your information?

2. Are you actually open minded or do you just want to hear what you believe reinforced?

3. Have you taken years of minor unconscious steps to design a media landscape that over time that only shows you what you already believe to be true?

The world has changed a lot in the last 20 years. And the media/news landscape is radically different than it was in the past.

The internet has given us unprecedented access to free speech. At the same time, it has given every individual the freedom and most importantly the responsibility to design our own media landscape.

Don’t you want all humans to live in harmony? To feel free and expressed? To have compassion for each other?

If you really want to build bridges and create the reality that we all know is possible—then it is more important, now, than any other time in history, to really try to listen to what other actual people are actually saying. Not just read the headlines and assume they are the worst case. Ask: “How do you feel?” And most importantly — “Why do you feel that way?”

Go speak to your neighbor that has a different political sign in their yard, and goes to a different church or synagogue than you. Or your co-worker who has an LGBTQ daughter or drives a big truck with a strange flag on it.

Really try this — it will change your whole life.

Listen to them, without your biases, don’t get upset or mad if the things they are saying are different from what you believe. Ask them why.

For every podcast that reinforces your worldview, listen to one that doesn’t. For every hour of Fox watch an hour of CNN. For every influencer your follow -- follow one you don’t agree with. For every NYT article your read — listen to a Joe Rogan episode.

And vice versa in every way.

Politics, in a democratic and free country, quite literally is the battleground where we find peaceful compromise to live together in harmony with those who have different spiritual and cultural practices than ourselves.

If you immediately dismiss someone who has a different point of view than yours as “ignorant” or a “detached elite,” then you are not choosing to live with the real freedom you have been granted or profess to believe in. Rather, you seem to maybe prefer a fundamentalist dictatorship, where you are only surrounded by people who believe in what you do — and there are plenty of those to choose from.

The below statements are challenging examples - that I do not profess, believe in, or support either side of these issues. I write them to provide provocative topics worth thinking about. To prove a point about the one-sidedness of many of our deeply held, complex and nuanced beliefs, that today have been distilled down to headlines. Considering these things will likely trigger you and force you to consider that another sane, educated, empathetic and intelligent human being might have a really powerful, deep and legitimate reason to believe something different then you. If you copy and paste one of these and post it as a critique of my writing, you are missing the point. But I assume one of you will anyway.

• If you are pro-choice, have you even spoken to someone about why they are pro-life? Could you consider that the spiritual act of a soul choosing a body to come to this life from the spirit world is a deeply held spiritual belief of another? Or are you just reading the headlines about them and assuming that they are one of the few radical ignorant religious zealots who hate women?

• If you are pro guns, have you even spoken to someone who is anti guns? Have you considered that they are terrified and might have had a family member or loved one killed by senseless gun violence? Or are you just dismissing them as some communist liberal who wants to take away your freedom?

• If you are pro-immigration, have you spoken to someone who is anti-immigration? Could they be someone who has lost their job due to the loss of entire industries disappearing or going over seas. Or someone whose family has been in the USA for generations living the American dream, but now they can’t afford to feed their children or get enough social services or nutritious food? Or are you just calling them a racist, ignorant, deplorable who hates Mexicans?

• If you are protesting to save Gaza, have you spoken to an Israeli whose child was raped and murdered and posted on the internet? Or are you just calling that person a genocidal, zionistic maniac?

• Did you ever stop to wonder how beautiful the call to prayer is? How it unites a community to consider that life is more spiritual than the temporal day to day - 5 times per day? Or do you hear it and simply hear the call of a misogynistic, Islamic extremist whose main motive is to suppress women? Have you considered that millions (but not all) women who choose to wear a hijab feel safe and free in that clothing? That they often express grief for western women who they see as being ‘forced’ by society to objectify themselves sexually and are disrespected because of it? Can you consider that they feel the same way about you as you might for them?

• Have you considered how profound it must feel to surrender your life to Jesus Christ as your lord and savior? Or do you hear someone say that and assume they are an ignorant, middle-class American who doesn’t have access to education or understand science? Have you considered they might have found deep peace and authentic community within a religion that, among many other things we can discuss, has truly helped many hundreds of millions through their toughest times?

• Could you understand what it must feel like to experience the oneness of a deep state of meditation or yoga? Or do you see a far left, woke, radical elite with no family values, who hates God and thinks they are better than you?

Broad, sweeping statements about the morality and worth of an individual based on the headline of their stance on a single issue dismisses that person as a human. It creates a divide and ends their worth; and in your mind, deprives them of human status. It makes them some crazy ‘other.’ Is this the world you want to live in? The de-humanization, based on meme-ified headlines, of your neighbors and fellow humans?

Those of you, who like me, carry an American Passport, are so deeply fortunate to have freedom of speech to express ourselves, the freedom to choose, the freedom to live near people who are different than us and the freedom to live near people who believe in what you do. And we have a crazy political system that has been, more or less, stable for hundreds of years.

Today, it is up to each one of us to be both deeply passionate about our beliefs as well as compassionate in our differences of opinion and cultural practices. We are all working toward a common goal of creating a better, more fully expressed life for ourselves, our loved ones and most importantly the next generation. Consider that this is the shared common goal. It’s why we all choose to fight for what we believe in.

Every day we live within a grand experiment of managing the wants, needs, beliefs and desires of millions and billions of strangers who all want to be happy. Can we do better? Yes. And my suggestion is to start be making friends with someone who feels very differently than you about the things that are happening politically right now in the USA.