Out in the world, it’s been a really crazy couple of weeks. I could go on for hours about the shutdown and the rest of the seriously screwed up situation in our seriously polarized, uncivil, and sometimes monstrous country.
I’m not going to do that.
Instead, I’m going to talk about Michael Beatty for a few minutes here.
Who’s he? Well, he’s an average guy, like most of us, who doesn’t always do what he knows he’s supposed to do for his health. Unlike most of us, he ended up in a coma due to that… and very luckily, he pulled through.
And came home to a mountain of medical debt and a fixed income to try and handle it with.
Like most of us, Michael follows the back and forth of conversation on social media from time to time, agreeing with what he agrees with, and sometimes savagely roasting what he doesn’t.
This week, it was a post from Patton Oswalt that he felt the need to spew some bile on, personally attacking the comedian.
I’ve followed Patton for years… while I don’t always like his work, I hold tremendous empathy for the man. What he did next brought me to tears.
Instead of firing back at Michael as a faceless online entity, he stopped and looked at the person. He put himself in Michael’s shoes. And, well…
He helped Michael pay his medical bills.
This, this, THIS is a shining example of what we keep forgetting. We aren’t Trump supporters or moms or dads or blue collar or Republicans or Democrats or antivax or pro life.
We’re people. Every single one of us has a story that shaped who we are and why we react the way we do. That’s what the folks interested in controlling us want us to forget, they want us to be labels, cause they know it’s way easier to weaponize people against a label.
It shouldn’t be so easy to weaponize us against each other. But thanks to our own need to feel like we’re ahead of someone else in the race, our desire to be better than, our fear of experiences unlike ours, we’re handing them all the tools they need to do it.
Ironic, isn’t it? In an age where communication is the fastest and most accessible it’s ever been, we let it be used to make people hate each other, because when we’re divided, we’re easier to control. We don’t have to let this be the norm… we can decide how we feel about people. We can decide that someone holding a different view from ours doesn’t make them or us wrong.
Forget the labels. Learn about the people, walk in their shoes. Choose kindness and understanding.
Curiouser and Curiouser 