Communication Failure

“If you aren’t angry as hell, you aren’t paying attention.”

At least that is what the bumper sticker I saw on the back of a car told me years ago. I remember thinking about it back then, and wondering if I should be paying more attention, and if I wasn’t really understanding what was going on around me. Or maybe it was a bit of both.

Today, things are very, very different. It seems like everyone I see is mad about something, but whether or not it’s because they are paying attention or living in a damn dream world, I don’t know. And the crux of the entire issue – the most important piece of this for me – is how do you tell? And what do you do if you find the person you are talking to is living in a dream world? And how do you communicate to them that what they think is truth isn’t real? Those are the questions I struggle with today, especially when I see friends’ posts about becoming anti-vaccine, or when someone casually speaks about listening to a documentary that others claim is pushing right-wing ideology (both which have seen happen this month).

It may seem like I’m asking naive questions, but in many ways, I am inexperienced at trying to have the deeper discussions where tensions can flare. In my world growing up, welfare queens were in all of the big cities that had horrible crime rates (especially Detroit). People of color just needed to get their own acts together and ‘actually do the work’ in order to get ahead. We added the phrase ‘born and unborn’ at the end of the Pledge of Allegiance that was recited every morning in school. And most importantly, I was taught that moral values (i.e., ‘Christian’ values) were slowly being drained out of the nation.

It has taken me over thirty years to get that shit out of my head. Well, most of it at least. Sometimes it’s still a struggle not to have a knee-jerk judgement in my head to something I hear or a situation that triggers those original teachings. Perhaps that is why, when I see something being discussed that’s a right-wing dog whistle, I start getting angry and am not able to vocalize my concern. As an adult, I did the reading, looked at the data, and realized that what I was taught was wrong – VERY wrong. So wrong that it’s what in many ways have brought this nation to the edge of the cliff it now sits on. Will we continue to be Democratic or will we be pushed into Authoritarianism? Will people I care about deeply have to flee across the border because of the so called ‘moral’ values that so many people are turning a blind eye to? Will people all around me continue to patronize companies and vote for politicians who swear to keep them ‘safe’ from those welfare queens as they continue to drain all the resources possible from everyone and from the earth for their own personal privilege?

The stakes are high. So I continue to try to figure out how to speak about this. But when I try to gently approach family members about what I was taught, I get nowhere. I get treated as I am overthinking, that I’m wrong, or the data I provide simply gets ignored. So if I can’t get my family members to believe me or even talk to me about these things, how would I get anyone else, especially other polytheists and pagans looking at those right wing gateways to do so?

Right now, I feel like the situation is so dire, these conversations NEED to be had. Maybe not with the dufus who painted their truck with the figure of Jesus blessing that orange motherfucker, but to someone who thinks the No Labels organization putting up a third party candidate is the right move (even when third party candidates have always resulted in a Republican getting into office) that RFK is the new JFK, or that the blue and red lines on flags to show support for police and fire departments are actually being used by racist organizations for recruitment. Those people could be worth talking to. But instead of having that conversation, I just get so damn angry that I can’t say anything at all. They may not believe it, but this isn’t just about politics anymore. This is about having freedom in this country to be authentic to ourselves, to assemble in supportive communities (or in protest), and to have freedom over our own damn bodies.

So, yeah. I guess I have been paying attention. And I AM mad as hell, especially at people who aren’t fully seeing the entire picture. And I want to figure out what to do about it. I want to have the conversations with those who are willing to be open to figuring out what is really going on in the world. We need those conversations because what I see around us right now is a damn dire situation, and much of it is going to come down to the next series of elections. Because the outcome of those could mean whether or not I can express my identity as a pansexual polytheist, or if I’ll just be grateful to be married to a white middle-aged man and could be classified as a Martha and not a handmaid.