This one’s been building for a while. And yeah, it’s gonna be long, because nothing real ever fits on a bumper sticker.
The world feels off-kilter right now. People are scared, confused, angry, me included. And we’re all being told to pick a side. Blue vs. red. Cops vs. protesters. Guns vs. no guns. But I’ve lived too much life to buy into that anymore. Real life doesn’t come in absolutes. People don’t fit in boxes. And the moment we start pretending they do, democracy starts to die.
Ten years ago, I didn’t own a gun. Didn’t want one. Wasn’t shy about saying it either. I said the same stuff a lot of my liberal friends say now: made fun of “gun nuts,” joked about “amosexuals,” rolled my eyes at AR-15 pictures on Christmas cards. I thought I was being clever. But I wasn’t being curious.
Then life changed. I got close (chosen family close) with two people who couldn’t have been more different. One was liberal, the other a Trump voter. They both owned guns. They had kids. They made my wife and me godparents. They let us into their world. We showed up for each other through the hardest things you can imagine: loss, war, daily life. And I learned something simple and true:
The guns weren’t the problem. The division was.
I want to hunt with them. I want to build a rifle with them, not because I’m a “gun guy,” but because I love them, and this is part of their world. But now it’s illegal for us to even do that in our own states. The people who have them get to keep them. Everyone else? Tough luck. No education. No nuance. Just restriction. And I started to see how the liberal movement I loved was shrinking itself with purity tests.
It’s not just guns. It’s the language. The way we speak to and about each other. I’ve lost friends for not toeing the exact party line on one issue or another. It’s like disagreement is betrayal now. Like curiosity is disloyalty.
That’s not democracy; that’s dogma.
And then there’s the other side. The conservatives who welcomed me into their lives. Some of them don’t agree with me on almost anything politically, but they love me. And I love them. And because we love each other, we listen. We argue, yeah, but we listen. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s the part we’ve lost.
Because the real enemy? It’s not conservatives. It’s not liberals. It’s not cops or activists.
The real enemy of democracy is division. The people who profit from it. The ones who need us to hate each other to stay in power.
The enemies of democracy speak in absolutes.
“They’re all traitors.”
“They all want to destroy America.”
“You’re either with us or against us.”
Sound familiar?
They speak like it’s war. Like we’re not neighbors, coworkers, family. Like we’re soldiers in opposing armies.
You want to know the truth?
I love cops. One of my closest chosen family members is a police officer. I know what he goes through. I know what they go through. I’ve heard the stories. I’ve poured the drinks after the shift. I’ve stayed up at night worrying about them getting home.
And I also believe Black lives matter. I believe in justice. I believe no badge should shield anyone from accountability. I can hold both of those truths at once, because I’m not owned by anyone’s narrative.
That’s what it means to be human. And that’s what democracy needs: humans. Not extremists. Not avatars. Not soundbites.
And yeah, I probably will run for office someday. Because I’m tired of watching people who’ve never missed a mortgage payment or had their lights shut off tell working-class people what’s best for them. I’ve run small businesses. I’ve worked in child care. In medical. I’ve failed. I’ve survived. I’ve shown up for people when no one else did.
And I’ll tell you this right now: We have to take back our relationship with police and the military.
Liberals don’t hate the military. We don’t hate cops. That’s a lie people sell to keep us at each other’s throats. What we hate is being lied to. What we hate is injustice. What we hate is watching our people, on both sides, get used as pawns.
We were never protesting the troops. We were protesting the man who put them there. We were never calling cops evil. We were calling for accountability. We wanted the good ones to go home. We still want them to go home.
So yeah. Things are scary right now. But they’ll get a hell of a lot less scary when we stop listening to people who speak in absolutes.
When we start remembering that disagreement is not disloyalty.
That curiosity is not treason. That a man who owns a gun can still want peace. That a cop in uniform can still be someone’s son, someone’s friend, someone who reads bedtime stories and kisses his wife on the forehead before going out to face god knows what.
We get one country.
And if we don’t start treating each other like it matters, we’re gonna lose it.
Executive Dysfunction Weekly
No Kings. No Absolutes. No Bullshit.
