#and polarization

[sanddollarpoems]

The truth is, I started in a very different place than I am now. Perhaps I am the evidence of evolution, that a person can go from one side to the other in a matter of years. I have family and friends who still think the same way. They echo the same hurtful words. They babble the same disrespectful slogans.

Last week, while feeling scared, disappointed, and emotionally bruised, I had to explain why people like me felt like I did. I had to be the adult, take the slander, and share about why people like me who didn't agree, people who feared for their rights as a human, were angry and sad and upset.

To be fair, I grew up on the other side. I grew up listening to my dad rage against the "flaming liberals" and the "fema-nat-zees," listening to Rush Limbaugh, and conservative talk radio. And as I grew up, the information I was fed was consistent. I was surrounded by people of like minds, and it was very easy to agree. No one challenged me. No one asked me WHY I thought what I did. No one pointed out my racism, my hurtful words, or my prejudice.

I got married young to a man who enjoyed telling me how to think and what to believe. And perhaps that's when I started feeling the cracks in my belief system. I started having my own thoughts, secretly, of course. I started struggling with the things that didn't add up.

It's so easy to pick someone's motives if you don't know that person. It's so easy to "other" them if they don't fit into your tiny understanding of the world. But God has a sense of humor. He gave me a double dose of empathy and compassion. I started meeting people, and they didn't fit into my categories. I started meeting people who I couldn't make sense of. I started meeting people who I had been taught to hate. But I didn't hate them. They were just people who hoped, and loved, and lived just like me. In fact, I started seeing they were all just like me.

And then, I became the "other." With my divorce, 90% of the people I had called friends, left me. My church, who had been like a family to me, left me. I was the sinner. I was the outcast. And because I was a victim of abuse, I had been talked out of asking for child support, even though he made over three times what I did. Now, I was also the woman standing in line at the grocery store, using my EBT "food stamps." I was a "leech on society," as my dad would say.

Remember how I said God has a great sense of humor? Well, guess who were the ones to come around me and support me and love me and lift me up? That's right. It was the people who I used to "other." It was the single mom's, the LGBTQ, the "flaming liberals," the atheists, the women of color...

For the first time in my life, there was no judgment, just kindness. There were no impossible standards, no mistreatment for being different, no more expectations to conform. There was freedom.

I have since come to a place where all those things my dad used to insult people with are now true of me. And this past week, as my friend was talking about the "woke morons," I gently told her that I'm one of those.

The truth is, we're all just people. We all want safety and well-being for ourselves and our families. A lot of us want that for our communities, and some even want it for the world. Most of the people I've met on both sides are generally good-hearted people. We all have been taught to say hurtful things, to believe hurtful things, and sometimes to even do hurtful things to "others." But I believe that for most people, these are learned behaviors.

My dad used to quote the Bible and say, "believing that there's good in people is a lie. Everyone is evil if they're not a Christian." These days, I believe God made humans in his own image. And having kindness and love are the traits that everyone has inherited from him. These are the things I have seen in others. And so I continue to believe that everyone has the ability for great kindness, and if we all exercised that kindness more readily, this world will not be such a scary place for any of us. Even if we don't all agree on the politics.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[nkp1981]

Bear Selfies Captured By Camera Traps

[lovertm]

wooden bears by CarversStudio

[arttuff]

lil dickie got bored on a stakeout :/

[bearlyfunctioning]

NonBEARnary 💛🐻‍❄️💜 🖤

[baihujun]

A Tim for @mlim8

[prideprejudce]

this whole oceangate submarine fiasco has actually led to a lot of interesting talks and debates about the grey area of human empathy vs the inclination to recoil at the bizarre behaviors of the ultra wealthy and how people struggle with both ideas and is actually very interesting to watch play out in different types of people

[cressidium]

Polar Bear | Canada Wild

[clove-pinks]

hey don't cry, ‘large’ creature with 20 arms found lurking in Antarctic sea, okay??

[catmask]

round 2 of pokemon from my heartgold artlocke streams.... some new friends, some old, and some now gone....

[chaotic-goodsir]

[henk-heijmans]

Polar bear climbing down a cliff to hunt Brunnich's Guillemot chicks, Alkefjellet, Norway, 2013 - by Arjen Drost (1976 - 2023), Dutch

[vangoghcore]

by llumsdelartic

[charlesdesvoeux]

the greatest discovery a 19th century man can make when stuck in the arctic/antarctic is that of gay sex btw