Choosing The Keyboard and the Ballot Box

GOETHE SAID: "We are united by sentiment, and sundered by opinion". Goethe, widely believed to have been not only the greatest writer ever produced by European culture, is also widely considered to have been the most intelligent person to have ever live. This, from those psychological and intellectual analyses often conducted on long dead famous people. Its dubious. No matter how intelligent we think someone is, or how beautiful,or athletic, or virtuous, there is always somebody else, usually lurking just around the corner, with superior attributes. To compare people becomes folly. Goethe, nonetheless, was always correct in his description of the world. You are invited to read anything he ever wrote. We all came together when the World Trade Center fell. We all come together when floods and tornadoes devastate the land. We all come together on Christmas and Memorial Day, sentimentally. Then, when we stray into the murky, turbulent realms of religion and politics, the twin titans of animosity, we find ourselves, once again, sundered by opinion. My temptation to thoroughly despise Trump supporters, my friends among them, runs rampant, assuaged only by a kind word or deed, an invitation to dinner. My complaint with deeply religious people is that they seem invariably to have the tragic misconception that the religion they embrace, no mater what it is, should be embraced by all other people. some fine day humanity may well come to the realization that, as Goethe said: "when I realized that everyone invents his own religion, I decided to invent mine." But don't hold your breath. Notwithstanding my complete disdain for traditional religions and for political conservative, particularly Trump supporters, I have, a bit belatedly, determined to withdraw from the battlefield of argumentative conversation, and to be content to express my opinions and beliefs in two venues: essays, and the ballot box. there is a ray of hope. One of my best friends, an ardent Trump supporter, recently confided to me that, well, Trump supporters"cringe" as he put it, as many as a dozen times a day. its the most i will ever get out of him, but I'll have to take it, its enough. It offers a glimmer of hope. There is a sense of liberation, I am finding, in knowing that my future consists of writing and publishing essays, and going to the ballot box. The senseless arguments can be discarded. Confirmation bias precludes any hope of accommodation. see, its like this. Facts don't matter. We humans only accept facts which support our preexisting convictions, and we reject those which do not. It is not possible to "win' an argument, nor to influence anyone, with fact, except in a debate class, in which the respective arguments are carefully scored by an authority figure. I do not intend to seek out a moderator to monitor every argument with some dumb Trump-lovin' sumbitch, or some cross loving christian barbarian. I am reduced to writing and publishing essay, and voting. Somehow, it will be enough. It will have to be.