100 Words Per Mile: Reflections - 9
If you’re reading this, thinking, “Exactly. Tell that to the other side,” then you’ve already fucked up.
The timing of this week’s post was a bit surreal. A week before the 2020 General Election, I took a moment to ruminate about what was at stake, and what it meant for our country to make one decision or another. I had concerns about our weakening empathy.
Joe Biden, of course, would go on to win and become president the next four years, but here, in 2025, we’re once again dealing with the chaos of a Trump presidency, one that is more authoritarian and vindictive than the first time around.
From his fiery message of division and finger-pointing after the assassination of Charlie Kirk to his administration using its power to muzzle Jimmy Kimmel — and free speech in general — this has been one long week of what will be 208 (hopefully). Trump is proving once gain he prefers trolling over leading and buzz words like tariffs to a policy built around positive results. 174 more weeks to go.
But I’m not going to stew. My responsibility isn’t to lecture any one person to think a certain way. I wrote five years ago that nobody seemed capable of sitting with something and it remains true today.
When my wife and I talk about these moments, it always comes back to, “How do we prepare the kids for this?” When so much feels out of our control, we at least have this, which is not only actionable, but imperative to the future of the world.
For us, it starts with compassion for other people. If we teach them anything else, it starts there. It becomes an exercise of what it means to listen, hear, and understand. Discourse these days has become a back-and-forth “Oh yeah? What about …” which means no one is listening to anybody. You’re too busy thinking of the next thing you’re going to say.
Everyone just wants to win. Nobody wants to be better. Charlie Kirk’s murder is upsetting. Watching people who had nothing to say when Melissa Hortman was assassinated in her own home come out of the woodwork to express outrage of Charlie Kirk, as well as the inverse, bothered me more, because it revealed something about the people of the world.
When you pick-and-choose when to be upset about something, then you have no real moral principle. You don’t care about pursuing a moral truth. You just want to win. Nihilism is a rapidly spreading cancer that affects all of us. We need the chaos because we need the headlines because when nothing is happening, we realize we don’t feel anything at all.
Winning doesn’t make a thing work again. It doesn’t improve the path forward.
And, if you’re reading this, thinking, “Exactly. Tell that to the other side,” then you’ve already fucked up.
My wife and I will be teaching our kids to understand the world is only as good as how many people are free from suffering. That the only thing that helps others is helping others. We will emphasize humility (you don’t know, and you’ll never know everything), compassion (you are of no position to minimize someone else’s suffering), and the power of a common goal (where do you want to be? what does it take to get there?).
Some people balk when I tell them my wife and I never fight. Not that we don’t disagree, but we have never fought and have never raised our voices with one another. I joke and say, “What’s there to fight about?” Because I don’t see what function fighting serves in a marriage.
Really, you can fight about anything, but that only makes sense if fighting and winning are your primary desires. In my marriage, winning means nothing. We gave that up a long time ago. Instead, we are united in the common goal that we still want to be together when it’s all said and done. So, we try to make decisions and do the work that will get us there. There’s nothing we could fight about that would be more important than that.
If our country is a marriage — which would be a massive simplification — then what is the common goal? I have faith one exists, but it’s clouded by winning and the short-lived euphoria of being right. For some, winning is doing and saying the thing that will put the most money in their bank account. What’s that old Ghandi saying? “We but mirror the world … as a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”
But, like I said, I don’t know, and never will know, everything. Maybe we should all just start there.