I am sitting at the last diner standing (My favorite diner has closed permanently). I am sipping coffee and listening.

I do that a lot here. Just listen. It’s my little microcosm of America, my diner. Where I hear what people think and how they feel unvarnished by commentators and politicians. Since I live in an odd corner of America where more liberal folk and more conservative folk like side by side, for the most part fairly peacefully, listening to the patrons here is an education. One I am glad for. It has taught me to take my own thoughts with a grain of salt.

Most people seem to feel their side is right and the other side is wrong. And the anger in the that right or wrong has grown exponentially in the last decade. There’s been a lot of press about the anger in America, and as much as I hate it, I have seen that growth of anger here in my little corner of Vermont and Upstate New York.

I have watched people, good people. People I have come to know and respect, move steadily from reasonable to unreasonable, from thinking to merely feeling, from polite in the face of differences to increasingly ugly. I have personally suffered the wrath that has grown and grown all in the name of “I’m right. You are wrong. Therefore I don’t have to respect you, be kind to you listen to you.”

I have watched what, a decade ago would have been diner discussions move to a contest over who can be louder and drown out the other side.

There was a time, a decade or so ago, I considered beginning a thinking man’s political blog. A place where I would take a topic and explain why the different sides felt what they did, what the background for those beliefs were, and add my own two cents to the mix. I come from a family that was once steeped in politics and I learned the art of understanding from them. I am not right all the time, but I have a pretty good track record of prognosticating. I believed I had something to add, something that might help others sort through things in their own head.

I even did a couple of trial runs of the idea here on this blog.

The hate! The anger! Understand that nothing in what I wrote was inflammatory. For the most part I don’t do inflammatory. But boy the responses were.

My life has transitioned to a place where I have built a world of peace around me. My work is largely built around lifting others, being kind to others. It is built not on rules as much as a few principles. One of which is “Love. No Exeptions.”

A candidate I read regularly is Marianne WIlliamson. Not that I think she has a chance in hell to win. Not that I even think she would be a good president if she did win. I think the sharks of politics and big money would chew up her every initiative and spit them out. But she has her pulse on how we’ve come apart and what needs to happen to heal the nation. She’s got that right even if she hasn’t got a practical plan for anything. I can’t imagine the email SHE gets. I bet it is brutal.

But here she is, at it again, a second time after often being ridiculed through one election cycle as a flake, a goofball, unrealistic; running again. One poll actually had her within 6 points of Biden in a head to head race. But take that with a grain of salt. She will never win. But she will never stop sharing her message of politics should be based on what everything should be based on – love.

Yes, I admire her. I didn’t have that courage to carrry on. A few doses of hate mail and I backed down, deciding to continue my message of love as a powerful thing in other ways. Yes, I admire her perseverance in the message, and it has made me a little ashamed of my own weakness. Maybe I should be tougher. Maybe I should have put myself out there more.

But, I have learned, simply trying to live a life of love, never mind inserting it into politics, is controversial. We live in a time where most people believe in love as conditional. As something you earn and reserve for some people and withold from others. Despite my quiet advocacy, I still get flack. Now and again, even as mild as I am, I get hate.

I argue with myself a lot. Was I/Am I a coward? Is there a place for quiet love in our angry world? Do I, as I would like to think, reach people with my quietness that I might might not reach were I more strident? Or is that just a self soothing lie I tell myself. At times I fall on both sides of that argument. At times I think about starting that blog. But then I remember how I felt when the angry ones came at me.

That’s the tactic of anger. I have come to understand that. Be loud. Be rude. Be cruel. Intimidate. Make the other side back down in fear. Not in mindfulness or strength of argument or facts or caring. Use the harshness as a weapon to keep discussion at a minimum. Both sides do it. It’s become the way we have become as a people.

But…. and I really believe this…… there are a lot of people who are not that way. We’ve all just been shouted and threatened into silence. Afraid of being shamed, or shamelessly abused as people for merely having an opinion. I believe there are still a lot of people who are not full of hate, but instead are full of, as I have often been, full of hurt and not willing or even able to deal with the vitriol.

As I get older, I have become stronger in my beliefs. More willing to share them. I do it differently now, rarely wading in the conversation with my battle axe and sword flashing. Instead I simply say “I guess I see it a little differently.” Now and again people will ask and I get a chance to tell my side of an issue. Generally, because they have asked, they treat me as something less than a demon, Conversations break out. It’s good. Even when we continue to disagree.

But still, I am not in the place where I have the courage to go more public. To set myself up for the hate. It is perhaps a weakness. Or self preservation. But I still argue with myself if I am weak, or wise.

I think there are a lot of us, from my experiences in the last diner standing. Maybe you.

OK, enough of my quiet rant. I tried to do this in a poem. Didn’t work. Life is an experiment,

Be well. Travel wisely. There a place for love. I believe that.

Tom

PS: The picture is of the Birdseye diner in Castleton, Vermont. It is a little far to go for me, but it is a lot more picturesque than the last diner standing, aka The Pine Grove Diner in Granville, NY.