Healing Divisions

By looking for the good in others

As I stumbled my lazy ass out of bed this morning, I was struck by a recent memory. That in turn triggered a brief thought. A thought that was perhaps profound. Of that, you get to be the judge…

Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash

As a subscriber to Emeth, you’ve likely seen that there is a new feature called Notes. It went live for everyone yesterday, but prior to that the developers invited all of us who are considered to be Bestsellers here on Substack to use it in advance. They did that, I presume, both to use us as lab rats, letting us run around, push buttons, and find the issues that needed to be fixed. They also did that so that there would be some actual content for people to see when they opened it up.

But the reasoning isn’t important to this story. What’s important is that for some time there were a small number of us, all who have achieved some level of success with the written word, put in the same online space, all together. There were no filters dividing subscribed from not subscribed or anything else to keep us apart. We were all just in one big room together.

Those who know me know that my professional life has been spent in the political realm. Fairly non-partisan in my current role, but for the vast majority of my adult life I worked exclusively for one side of the partisan divide. I was a partisan political appointee.

Each side of that partisan divide has its heroes. And each side has those it wages political war against. That’s just the nature of politics. It works well when we can all properly understand that the other side’s motives are not in question. That allows us to be civil to each other, and more importantly it allows that compromise that is necessary for our political system to work.

Unfortunately, that understanding that people on both sides of the aisle have good motives and are simply working for that which they believe is right has broken down quite badly in recent years. Civility is largely dead in the political realm, but more importantly, our nation and our system has to a measurable degree, broken down. In far too many cases the art of the possible is no longer possible, and our political system has stopped working for those it was designed to serve.

We can fix that.

Masonry can help to fix that.

It can show, through its example, how society can better function. We’ve talked of that here before.

This is why I woke up this morning remembering a string of interactions I had the other day while exploring the not yet open Notes.

I saw a woman make her first post. She was a few hours later to the game than I, but everything was still brand new, and we were all just sort of there, without instructions as to how the system was designed to work. Trying to figure it out.

I noticed when she posted because she is quite famous.

Famous I think in the real world, but hyper famous in the political world. Rock Star famous if political types followed Rock & Roll. She writes regularly for the biggest east coast newspapers, and she is on television all the time.

The thing is though, like all political operatives, she has a side. And that side isn’t mine. In fact, she is famous on my side because she is one of the people that my side considers to be the most bad of them all. If there was a poster person for everything in the world that my side opposes, she’d be it. The personified other that symbolizes everything my side fights against.

But she and I, well, we had a perfectly pleasant textual conversation. I read some of her stuff, she read a bit of something from me about Freemasonry. We interacted with each other, back and forth. I’d like to think that in the time we spent together, trying to figure out this new system, we each saw the essential humanity and innate goodness in each other.

Neither of us ever typed a political word.

Neither of us touched on a hot button issue, or a topic currently in the news.

And that is the thought I had as I awoke this morning. We choose the reality we want to live in. We can choose to look at political division and assume that everyone who disagrees with us is an enemy. We can choose to adopt a siege mentality. We can spend hours fighting with strangers on the internet.

Or we can make a better choice.

We can choose to put those things aside once in a while. We can choose to look at other people and try to find those areas in which we can agree, instead of those areas of disagreement. We can choose to acknowledge that good people can reasonably hold differing opinions. We can choose to be open to the world and those in it.

I’d like to think that I made a genuine connection, perhaps a new friend of sorts the other day. Politically I may still see her as the very worst sort of political hack, but a person’s politics is not the person. My time with her demonstrated that in the clearest way possible.

As we go through our lives, I think we will find ourselves much happier if we look to areas of agreement instead of disagreement. If we look for the good and the human in others. If we hope to heal divisions. And if we heed that Masonic prohibition against discussions about sectarian religion and partisan politics.

But not only will doing so make us happier as individuals, it is what we are called to do as Masons.

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Today’s post wasn’t really about the new Notes feature available to everyone who subscribes to Emeth, the interactions I had could have taken place on any platform. But, as long as I have you, I would like to mention something Notes specific, and then I’ll stop bothering you about it:

One tremendous benefit of Notes, I think, is that everyone with an Emeth Subscription of any kind, can post there, and that post can be seen by everyone else who is somehow subscribed or otherwise connected to Emeth. Given the way Facebook throttles Lodge upcoming event posts and the like, I think that by posting those things on Notes (continuing to post them on Facebook is good too) they will actually be seen by a lot more Masons than they would be on Facebook. There is no algorithm driving Notes so posts can be seen.

This can help to drive visitation, and that is good for our Lodges.