When Certainty and Anger Trump Truth and Love

Before I write anything else, I want to make clear that this (and everything I write) is simply my opinion. Too often I think we forget that everything we read, whether on a blog or in a book, is someone’s take on the facts. 

When we had our first child, we were desperate to know the right formula for parenting. What was the best way to teach colors, numbers, to potty-train, to discipline, to teach the faith, and to keep our kids out of prison when they become adults? Along with all the other new parents around us, we passed around the books, new and old, that we’d been told were magical manuals holding all the answers. The problem was that, the more books I read, the more conflicting views I encountered. The height of horrible parenting in some people’s minds was sleep training a child in a crib. The height of horrible parenting to others was not sleep-training. No matter what I chose, I was a horrible parent in someone’s mind. But who was right? Were either of them right? Eventually, I set the books aside, not because I didn’t want to be a good parent, but because I realized that I was just ingesting people’s opinions from their own experiences and undermining my own ability to decide what my child needed. While it was admirable for writers of these books to share the methods that worked for their children, their personalities, and their particular lives, it was a mistake to treat these tips as if they were gospel truths.

I’m rarely surprised when people have strong political opinions, even when I feel they don’t necessarily understand the entirety of the situation on which they are commenting or are oversimplifying the other side’s real motives and concerns. I’m sure plenty of people make the same assessment about the thoughts I express. I know I probably grate on many of my more liberal friends’ nerves while many of my conservative friends probably think I’m a RINO. None of that is surprising. What is surprising to me these days is the certainty with which people talk about the particulars of situations taking place in Washington or other parts of the country far from them, and their readiness to pass on information claiming secret knowledge about back room deals and heinous crimes (on the right and the left). Don’t get me wrong, I’m about as skeptical of the media as they come, and I have no delusion that the people in government are all saints seeking the good of the country all the time. Bias is a very real thing, and it has become worse and worse over my lifetime with journalists seemingly more and more eager to expose the next Watergate than to accurately report to the people what goes on in their government. But the obvious (to conservatives) bias in the mainstream media doesn’t make me any more certain of what I see coming from equally biased sources on the right. 

Last year I had someone who I love and respect very much show me some pictures on a phone. This person is very intelligent, has given me much valuable advice to live by over the years, and has always seem grounded very much in the real world. It was a satellite image of a site with a few buildings. Then I was shown a satellite image of the same area, but after the construction of more buildings. I can’t remember now exactly what this place was supposed to be, but it sounded conspiratorial. I am always wary when someone uses a few minutes of video or images to prove a larger point (in police encounters or anywhere else). There is just too much you can misconstrue. This was my first encounter with QAnon. 

Since I had worked for two years using satellite imagery to model locations, I was fairly familiar with this type of thing. I asked about how it was possible to know what years the images had come from or even where this place was. Sighing in frustration, the person went on to show me other pictures, none of which were overly convincing. Some of them compared patterned backgrounds of one place to patterns in other places in the world, but to me, these were common patterns used in design, like blue stripes, and certainly weren’t great evidence that the two places were linked. No matter what I said, this person was convinced that the whole of media throughout our entire lives was like a web of clues pointing to a giant, pedophilia ring in which children were tortured to make anti-aging drugs for celebrities and powerful politicians carried out satanic rituals. Our only hope was that JFK Junior (who had faked his death) and Donald Trump were working together to bring it all into the light.  

I don’t tell this story to ridicule this person or insult others who believe this. I tell it because I care deeply for people who have gone down this path, and it scares me for them and our country just as much as those on the left who believe that the US is inherently evil and must be destroyed in order to bring things to rights. 

The most difficult thing about these kinds of conversations is the fact that there are so many real occurrences that seem to support these theories—the falsities of the Russia investigation, schools teaching young kids sex-ed with what most parents would consider pornographic materials, and teachers worried about parents hearing their discussions during virtual learning. These make perfect sense in the larger QAnon narrative and lend credence for people who might otherwise reject it.

It is no surprise to me, given the demonization of police and white America that is woven in with legitimate expressions of concern about racial disparities on the left, that we have seen city blocks burn to the ground. It is no surprise to me, with the rise of QAnon, that the Capitol was stormed. We have so retreated into our various groups, often unknowingly living in an information world created by algorithms and social media, that we cannot simply disagree with each other on policy. We must question the very humanity of the person who sees things differently than we do.

When I was in college, I worked for a white, Democrat professor. Because he was blind, he employed students to monitor his classes and then work at his home scanning papers and helping with grading. He offered me the job while handing back the first paper I wrote for his class. I had written it on race and the death penalty, a topic about which I really had no pre-conceived notions and wanted to understand more. The information I found was both heartbreaking and nothing like the narratives I had heard. I had no idea that this professor’s wife was black until I was at their home and she came in from work. The stories I learned about them were fascinating, often woven through our interactions in bits and pieces. Looking back, I wish I had asked them more about their lives. This professor could be tough to take at times. He was smart, fair in his expectations of students, and prone to angry outbursts when he didn’t feel respected. He slammed his hand down on the podium and yelled “silence” once when there was too much chatter in the classroom. It never happened again.  

Early on in my time working for him, I proofread a test and, in my nervousness to check for spelling errors, had not noticed a numbering error and that some of the questions had been repeated. He handed it out to the class and students began asking questions, trying to understand the mistakes. Infuriated, he made everyone hand the test back in, and gave me the worst tongue-lashing I’ve ever received when I arrived at his house for work. He asked if I was trying to make him look like a fool. Given our different political perspectives, I could understand the question and, holding back tears, I begged forgiveness and told him that it was an honest mistake. I contemplated quitting after that day, but I’m thankful I didn’t. 

His wife was always the picture of calm and kindness. After I got the flu and missed a week of work, finally driving home to finish recovering, she told me that she would have gladly taken care of me if I’d come to their house. They never made me feel like my being a Republican made me any less deserving of respect or care to them. One day, I informed the professor that I had an opportunity to go to a rally for Elizabeth Dole and that Jesse Helms would be there. I really didn’t know much about Helms other than that he was a sort of icon for many in North Carolina. He didn’t say anything for a minute and then told me the story of when his wife went to Washington on a field trip as a child. Her class waited in Helmes’ office and, when he arrived, he asked why all these n****** had been let in. I could hear the contempt in his voice when he spoke the words and my heart sank. I imagined his wife as an innocent little girl, waiting with her class, only to hear that from the man who was supposed to represent her interests. The professor just went back to his work, and I was left speechless.

He did not blame me. He did not tell me to denounce my party. He didn’t say, “silence is violence” or ask me if I really wanted to be on the wrong side of history. He understood why I was a Republican. He taught the difference between the left and right fairly in his class and he didn’t assume that I carried the same thoughts on race as this elder statesman just because we shared some of the same thoughts on the role of government, but he wanted me to know what he thought of this man. The silence that hung in the air between us was far more powerful than any screaming could ever have been. 

 Backstage at the rally, there was a moment where I had the opportunity to meet Jesse Helms. It was an odd moment. This political giant was now an old man in a wheelchair. I spoke to him, but he didn’t respond, and I wasn’t sure how much he even understood of what was going on. He was wheeled onstage to much applause and then taken away again. I stood as an on-looker, trying to gather my thoughts. I wondered if his views had changed over the years and if he had lived with any regrets. I thought about the very different way that I and my Republican friends thought about race than this man from another time. I thought about my professor’s wife and what she must associate with such moments. I thought about what of my words I wanted stuck in people’s heads when I was old and gray and a shadow of my former self. Few moments have impacted me as much as that one. 

I learned much from that professor and his wife. I heard him talk lovingly about his parents who, though they had few resources, tried their best to give their blind son the best opportunities possible, teaching him to believe that he could do anything he set his mind to. He talked about the racism of those same parents with a mix of anger and sadness when he told me about marrying his wife. He taught me about loving people, about seeing them in the light of all that they were- the good and the bad. He gave a second chance to a young girl from across the aisle who seemed to be sabotaging him at one point. He taught me that history has many sides, and trying to figure out “the right side” is perhaps less important than living a life of integrity in which you treat those around you with grace, dignity, forgiveness, and the same kind of multi-faceted understanding that you yourself would want to be treated with. I long for this kind of understanding in our culture at large, for us to see the suffering of the frustrated while still condemning violence, seeking to talk them off the ledge instead of egging them on.

I hurt for those like my professor’s wife who have known the pain of racism. This is partially because I have known people like her. She is not an abstraction for me. She has a life and a family and a beautiful heart for people. I hurt for those involved in QAnon because they are real people, some who I know, not abstractions. They have lives and families and are upset about many things going on in our country, not all of which are conspiracy theories.

We all have a desire to feel certain, especially during the uncertainty of this year, and there are a number of incredibly divisive narratives on both sides that offer to solve that hunger for us — many people vying for our attention to be given to their opinions.

I don’t have the answers. There are many things of which I am not certain. But one thing I am certain of is that people are made up of much more than their political ideas, and when we reduce them to this, we all lose a piece of our shared humanity.