Remember What You’re Fighting For

I had a lovely conversation with a woman named Natalie via DialUp, an app that aims to revive the magic and intimacy of phone conversations. When we hung up, I looked out the window and had the thought that on the other side of these calls is always another human being.

It reminded me of The Christmas Truce between the Brits and the Germans in 1914 during WW1. On Christmas Eve the German soldiers began singing Christmas carols and invited the Brits to join them. The Brits were reluctant and cautious but eventually left their trenches and joined the merriment, shook hands, exchanged cigarettes, lit Christmas trees, and even played soccer with the Germans in No-Man’s land. It was a brief but powerful moment of realization for the men on both sides: in front of them, the abstraction of the forlorn enemy, the rabid monsters, were just human beings, like them.

For the next few days, after the soldiers returned to their respective trenches, there was peace. Jokes were fired back and forth instead of bullets, and they thought to themselves “why are we killing each other?” A few days later the German troops were ordered by high command to fight again. So they told their new British brothers that they would start shooting at a specific time but shoot high so the Brits could take cover. No one got hurt, and another few days of peace went by. But British HQ realized what was happening and announced that if anyone was found fraternizing with the enemy would be court marshalled and executed. The generals got their way.

This story parallels much of what is currently happening in the U.S., except that each of us is technologically equipped to be the general. A single tweet for instance has the power to ignite and inspire an entire nation toward a just cause. But it can also narrow our sense of shared humanity, distort reality, and throw us into “us” vs. “them” narratives, thus ultimately undermining the very ideals that we, hopefully, are striving towards.

All of this is to simply say that we must be vigilant in sifting through the constant barrage of messages being sent and amplified by the push of a single button, and to never lose sight of what it is that we truly are fighting for, now and in the future. We must ask ourselves: are we having a conversation or a debate? Are we truly listening, or are we waiting for our turn to speak, for the perfect moment to interject with our premeditated rebuttals? In the words of James Baldwin, a writer who had every reason to spend his life fueled by hatred of ‘the enemy’:

We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible because we’re still each other’s only hope.

Because in the end there are no sides. There is only us. All living together on a tiny pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam.