Not many of us have ever changed someone’s mind in a comment section.
Plenty of us have lost an entire Tuesday evening trying.
If we’ve been anywhere near a screen, a kitchen table, a waiting room, a church parking lot or a family group text lately, we’ve probably noticed the temperature. It’s election week. The country feels split down the middle, and both halves seem fairly sure the other half has lost its mind.
Here’s the part that keeps coming up around here. Roughly half of us are about to be disappointed. Not mildly. Deeply. And the other half will be relieved, and will try very hard not to gloat, and will mostly not manage it.
And then it’ll be Wednesday. We’ll still have to pick up the kids. Still sit with the person we’re caring for. Still love the brother-in-law.
So we’ve been asking ourselves a question that isn’t about who wins.
How do we stay kind this week, keep our light on, and not give up one inch of what we actually believe?
Because we don’t think the answer is “care less.” A lot of us have tried caring less. It tends to last about eleven minutes.
What the screen does to the inside of us
Here’s something we don’t talk about enough. Our emotions don’t usually respond to what’s true. They respond to what we PERCEIVE to be true.
Which means a week of this can be hard on our hearts and our heads, no matter which way we lean.
When the feed shows us the angriest voices on a loop, our bodies tend to react as if the threat were standing in our kitchen. Shoulders up. Jaw tight. Sleep a little more restless. The fuse a little shorter with the people who had nothing to do with any of it.
The American Psychological Association has asked about this in recent election years, and roughly seven in ten adults named the election a significant source of stress. That’s a lot of us walking around braced.
And if we’re already carrying something heavy, caring for someone in crisis, or going through something tough ourselves, this extra weight doesn’t land gently. It lands on top like a suffocating weight.
So maybe the first kind thing we can do this week is notice what is going on inside of us when we see the news. Not to stop caring. Just to stop handing our nervous systems to strangers who are paid to keep us agitated.
Feelings are information. They don’t have to be instructions.
The part we were hoping nobody would say out loud
Most of us are quietly certain we’re the reasonable ones.
We know this because everyone on our team is also quietly certain they’re the reasonable one. And we have a feeling the cousin somebody muted last Thursday feels the same way about herself.
A research group called More in Common asked Americans in 2019 to guess what people on the other side actually believe. Then they asked the other side. We were wrong. Both directions. We assumed far more of “them” held extreme views than actually do.
The detail that stopped us was this. The people who followed the news most closely guessed the worst.
Read that again. The more we watch, the less accurately we may be seeing each other.
So the picture in our heads of “the other side” might be a highlight reel. The loudest ten percent, on a loop, with music. Meanwhile the actual person in the next pew, or the next lane at the grocery store, mostly wants:
- a quieter street
- a kitchen that works
- for their kid to be okay
Same as us.
And here’s where perception and well-being meet. If we’re spending the week angry at a highlight reel, we’re spending real emotional energy on something that isn’t quite real. That energy had other places to go.
A man in 1911 had some thoughts about politicians
We went back to Wallace Wattles this week, the fellow who wrote The Science of Being Great more than a century ago.
He wrote, and we’re quoting here, that “our politicians are a petty lot.”
In 1911.
So if anyone was hoping this was a new problem, we’re sorry to report it isn’t. People have been exhausted by the people in charge for as long as there have been people in charge.
But that’s not what Wattles was actually getting at. He wasn’t complaining. He was pointing somewhere else. He said we have “nothing to keep right but ourselves”, and that “no combination of circumstances can keep us down if we keep our own attitude right.”
He also had this stubborn habit of saying “all’s right with the world.” Not finished. Not perfect. Right, and still being built. He looked at the strikes and the trusts and the mess of his own time and saw a world mid-construction, not a world falling apart.
Honestly, some weeks most of us can only hold that for about a minute. But we keep coming back to it, because the alternative is handing our peace to a group of people who, by his own account, were a petty lot a hundred years ago and haven’t sent word that they’ve changed.
Here’s how we’ve come to say it around here. Whoever wins on Tuesday, nobody gets elected to the inside of our heads. That seat is still ours.
Who sits in which chair may change what’s harder or easier for the country for a while. It doesn’t change what we’re made of, what we’re capable of, or who we get to be on Wednesday morning. We believe there’s something in each of us greater than any circumstance, situation or condition. We believe it the day after an election too.
You can’t shovel out darkness
There’s a line that makes the rounds every so often, usually with Einstein’s name attached, though he almost certainly never said it. The idea holds up anyway. There’s no such thing as darkness. There’s only light, and the absence of it.
We can’t scoop darkness out of a room. We can’t argue it out. We can’t shame it out. We can only turn on a light.
Dr. King said it better than anyone, and he actually did say it: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” This might be the whole thing.
When we’re furious at “the other side,” it doesn’t usually feel like a presence. It feels like a hole. Something’s missing. And if we’re honest about what’s missing, it’s rarely information. It’s warmth. The willingness to see a person instead of a position.
The negativity we’re swimming in this week may not be a force we have to defeat. It may just be an absence we get to fill.
That’s a very different job. Fighting darkness is exhausting and nobody wins. Bringing light is small, repeatable and oddly fun.
When our convictions turn the lights off
We want to be careful here, because we aren’t asking anyone to believe less.
Our convictions aren’t the problem. Everyone on this team has theirs, and we’re keeping them, thank you. The problem is when conviction quietly turns into scorekeeping, and scorekeeping turns into a kind of blindness.
It tends to show up at home before it shows up anywhere else. The kitchen table. The group text. The waiting room. The folding chairs at the meeting. Anywhere two people have to get through something together.
- The neighbor whose yard has the sign, and we decide from the sidewalk what kind of person lives there.
- The relative who posted one thing in October, and now every text from them reads as hostile.
- The person we’re caring for, who said something at dinner, and we’ve quietly started answering in fewer words.
We think we’re seeing clearly. We may just be seeing one thing, very brightly, and nothing around it.
The sneaky part is that it feels like integrity. Standing firm. Not compromising. But if our “standing firm” means we can no longer see the human in front of us, the lights are off, and we might be the ones who turned them off.
A lot of us have done this. Sorted a whole roomful of people by one bumper sticker and missed the one who was about to become a friend. The sorting is a useful skill. Until it isn’t.
So what do we do with this?
No side-switching. No pretending we don’t care. Three small places we might begin.
- Keep the conviction, put down the scorecard. We can say it plainly, to ourselves, before the week gets loud: Nobody gets elected to the inside of my head. Then try acting like it. Vote, speak, care, do the thing. And then let the result be the result, without letting it decide who we get to be.
- Find the one thing they want that we want too. There’s usually at least one. A safe kid. A fair shake. A Thursday with no surprises. We don’t have to agree on the road to notice we’re headed for the same town.
- Shine on purpose, at someone whose sign we don’t like. Not a lecture. Not a hint. One kind thing, aimed deliberately at a person we’ve been sorting. Hold the door. Drop off the soup. Ask about their mother. Then watch what happens to the hole.
None of this requires anyone to be wrong. It only asks us to turn a light on and see who’s actually there.
A word about the heavier weeks
For some of us, this isn’t really about an election. The world was already too loud, and this week turned it up. If that’s where we are, kindness to the other side can wait. Kindness to ourselves comes first, and that may mean reaching for real care from a doctor, a counselor or a crisis line. Reaching for that care isn’t a weakness. It might be the most important thing we do.
For those of us walking beside someone in crisis, election stress can crowd out the attention they need from us. It might help to remember that muting the feed isn’t checking out of the world. Sometimes it’s checking back in to the person in the next room.
And for those of us who are mostly fine, this is our week to carry some light for the rest. Nothing dramatic. A text. A casserole. A door held open for someone whose bumper sticker we don’t love.
Wednesday morning
Half of us will be disappointed this week. Maybe you. Maybe us.
Disappointment is allowed. Grief is allowed. Muting the group chat is, frankly, encouraged.
But we’d love for us all to come back to this. Change has rarely arrived neatly. Every real turnaround any of us has been part of, in a life or a family or a community, seemed to come through a stretch that looked like chaos from the inside. The mess isn’t always proof that something’s broken. Sometimes it’s proof that it’s moving.
So here’s the question we’re sliding across the table this week. The coffee’s still warm.
Where exactly is our light in all of this? Not our opinion. Our light.
That question is pretty much why Standing Tall Igniting Hope exists. We’re a Community of the Heart, people in crisis, people who love someone in crisis, and people who’ve simply decided that emotional and mental well-being belongs in every part of life, elections included. If you’d like to keep your light on with us this week, there’s room. Share a story below of someone who surprised you across the divide. Give an hour. Give a casserole. Or help fund a treatment scholarship for someone whose hardest week has nothing to do with a ballot.
Tell us below. Where’s your light this week?
With love and hope,
Colleen and The Standing Tall Igniting Hope Team
