The Battle Nobody Wins

Image Credit: Wallpaper Cave

If you think what I’m about to say is about you, it isn’t. I am speaking in general terms about the craziness in the world as I see it. We live in a time where posting an opinion on social media easily draws the ire of people who have become increasingly hostile over real and imagined offenses. Often the real offenses are magnified so much that something that should have been a conversation seeking a solution instead attracts swarms of e-warriors ready to do battle to the death. Nothing but total humiliation and destruction of our opponent will satisfy us. It feels like we are in a video game where people vie to score points against the cartoonish figures we create and label. We are good and right, and they are evil and wrong. Listening to people is too much work; instead we create our boxes and trim the people we disagree with until they fit in the box we have already prepared our arguments against. That’s what I hear when people say “the left” and “the right” and of course those who aren’t ‘left enough” or “right enough” are traitors.

When you don’t listen you don’t have to think. You make the people who disagree with your view fit in the box, then take your collection of rocks off the shelf and cast them at the enemy.

This seems like madness to me.