Fear Drives Us: Our Voice, Our Vote, Our Hope.
Before you continue, I want to make something abundantly clear. No relationship, friendship, or familial connection is more important than your physical, emotional, and mental safety. I don’t write the words below to encourage you to put yourself, your family, or communities in harm’s way in the name of building bridges, and false hopes of connection with those intent on denying your humanity, needs, and safety. My words are instead an outcry of frustration about the silos we have built for ourselves. I hope, fervently we find a way out.
Just a few weeks ago, I, like so many others, arranged my day to be available to watch the first and possibly the only 2024 presidential candidate debate.
I was more curious than expectant, but nonetheless I hurried in from my bike ride and joined my partner to watch an exchange that left me with disappointment, more questions, and concern for our collective futures.
As I often do, after viewing any major event, I took to the internet, viewing social media and news outlets to glean what other folks were thinking, feeling, and seeing as we churn towards November 5th.
Like so many other times since 2015, I was filled with disappointment viewing the reactions of my social connections.
Before you stop reading, this isn’t a plea to convince you to vote for or not vote for someone. I am most interested in what makes our realities so vastly different. How do we all watch the same debate, read the same passages, hear the same interviews, and come out the other side on spectrums with a vastness hard to comprehend?
Why have so many folks ended friendships, stopped talking to their families, and built walls between people they love? I think there are many reasons, but the one I keep returning to and the one that seems to be the root of all the others. Fear.
It has gripped us. Crawled into everything we do, view, and experience. What we read and do not. What we watch and refuse to watch. Who we call a friend and who we don’t. Who we choose to love and who we won’t. Where we will live and the places we wouldn’t dare ever call home.
Our values are wrapped in the fear of what we don't understand and the championing of what we do.
I am so tired. I imagine that you are too.
I don’t want to look at people I’ve loved and known for years and believe they don’t care for me because they voted differently than me. But I have to admit I do.
I don’t want to only be in relationship with folks who mark the same checkboxes as me in the polling booth and yet I am afraid of what it means to sit across the table from someone who does. To be clear I’ve done this a lot in my life, and every time I’ve dimmed some part of me to make them more heard, understood, or comfortable, and I am left feeling less whole with my authenticity in pieces.
I want to continue to know, love, and understand the lives, concerns, and joys of all people, but at what cost?
Nuanced conversation feels dead and, in its place, strongholds rooted in fear and a false sense of safety built in shallow echo chambers. Maybe we never had it. Maybe what we believed was nuance was instead niceties. Civility. Deep separation cloaked in empty handshakes, firm smiles, and political correctness.
I don’t know.
I don’t have all of the answers to how we move out of this. How do we choose to push for progress together when we’ve made ourselves believe for so long that we are better, right, smarter?
Here is what I do know.
When you make it your mission to know people where they are in their thinking and life, it happens. You are handed a front-row view of the worries, joys, pains, and hopes of those around you clinging to what little certainty life offers.
Folks holding tightly to the cultures and identities they know. You see the fears of those who have lived in generations of families, friends, and communities that reflect their skin, religions, and orientations. You feel the whispers of scarcity and uncertainty in the shadows of every political promise.
I often think about the privileges I currently experience in comparison to the life I was born into. I know all too well that my story is reflected in the mirrors of many poor White rural children, now adults like me. Race is our dividing line and though our stories are inextricably linked our values today stand far apart.
I was raised in rural Missouri, seven miles outside of a town of 600 people. It’s hard to grow up in a place like this (especially if your family is integrating it, but that’s a story for another time), it’s hard to get out, to gain higher education, to make the kind of money that sets your family up for success. It’s harder still, to find where you belong when you do make it out. Of course, there are joys: parades, homecomings, the river in the summer, endless days outside with folks you love, gravel road Friday nights, packed gymnasiums, knowing your neighbors, and small-town charm.
I grew up in the kind of place where almost every child in my kindergarten class was also in my Head Start class and most of our parents didn’t go to college. Our realities were more alike than different. Even so, when I get online these days, I see most of the folks I grew up with are voting differently than me. I think the shallow answer to this separation is race and the real answer is fear. Fear of learning, feeling, and being uncomfortable. All of us.
I’ve been asked often why I keep “these people” around. Why do I allow them to be my “friends,” on social media? These days the only answer I have is that I am more fearful of a news feed where everything that looks back at me is already in my head than one that reminds me that not everyone views, experiences, or feels the same way I do about the world and its challenges.
Many people are not aligned with this way of being online and what they expose themselves to, and that’s ok. I understand, because this stance has not come without its fair share of deep disappointments.
Love, connection, conversation, friendship, and community does not come without a cost. What am I willing to pay? A question I ask myself often.
The last decade has taught me many things, but maybe the most significant is that we are all afraid. Afraid of what we don’t know. Afraid of change. Afraid to be uncomfortable.
Fear is the driving force behind so many of our decisions. How we vote, the jobs we choose, and where our children go to school. Our commitment to faith. When we speak up and when we don’t.
I’ve had a front row view of this fear for a long time as a DEI practitioner and the founder of a non-profit focused on inclusion for minoritized folks.
Trying to understand and know each other is heavy and hard. It means tough conversations, new learning, and saying “I don’t know,” or “I was wrong.” It means valuing those who don’t look, speak, or live like you with the same tenacity as those who do.
It requires a self-awareness that constantly reminds us that we can do better. It requires empathy and the ability to look past what we know and our own experience to hear and understand the lived realities of those around us.
We are a nation of silos, but silos have doors that we can move, that we can walk through. “People are hard to hate up close.”
