This was not what I was going to post today, but my goodness what a week in America.
Here’s my very brief comment on all of it:
I think this is the time for extreme decency, online discipline, and general grace.
I know, I know that’s annoying to say and to read, but frankly nobody else is going to give it to us and we deserve it. Actually we need it.
I believe it will get a little wild in the media and perhaps even on the street in the next few weeks and months. But just as the Justice Department and the January 6th Committee are conducting themselves with professional orderliness, I think we can too. All of us, from all perspectives.
That doesn’t mean we can’t have and share positions or opinions, and it doesn’t mean we can’t call out hypocrisy when we see it, but none of that has to include name-calling or mischaracterization of good people who happen to vote differently. I have seen even more of that than usual from both ends of the spectrum in the last 36 hours and (at best) it just muddies and devalues all the useful points people are trying to make.
As Michelle Obama so beautifully stated: “When they go low, we go high”.
This is the time for that.
It’s the time to rally around civility and integrity even while we push our candidates forward and stand strong in the face of other people’s indecency. We can do that. It always, always pays off in the end.
Review your tweets twice before posting, buy someone a cup of coffee in line behind you, pick up some litter, and call your Aunt Agatha just to say hi - yes that one who is a staunch ‘other-party-than-you’ supporter. Avoid sighing out loud during the call.
And when it is impossible to do any of that, because you’re having a ‘humanity sucks’ moment, you have full permission to watch reruns of the Golden Girls, cats being scared of cucumbers, or a carpool karaoke. Yes, even on a Thursday lunchtime.
Hope you all have a supremely lovely end-of-week….
Perfect. We need this reminder.... Thanks, Anne. 🙏
Beautifully said.