Growing up in a small town is useful because people can disagree politically, and it doesn’t matter all that much. When you spend your childhood with the same couple of people and play touch football together and Nintendo 64 and have all these hours of friendship and teasing each other and calling names and fist-fighting, then it doesn’t really matter when you discover that your friend likes Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. You can call them names for it and disagree and continue being friends – because that is just what you’ve always done. Unfortunately, this isn’t something you see happen between strangers, and especially not online, when political disagreements arise. You see the name calling but it is a viciousness and not the equivalent of friendly teasing. People really grow to hate each other because of their divergent political viewpoints. This discourages me.
But what returns me to hope is when I play video games online with some of the friends I grew up with – friends I disagree with politically and even religiously – and we get along just fine and occasionally we get into a few political spats but it doesn’t hinder our friendship because we know all along and deep down that, however much we think the other person is wrong, that person is our friend and that they genuinely care. The connection means something: to the point of transcending political disagreement.
This is not about being indifferent, mind you (if our friend is wrong, we feel the need to correct them); it is about seeing something in another person that no wrongheaded opinion cannot ever completely impugn. Call it dignity.