Today I had a conversation/discussion/exchange/argument with someone on social media. She could not understand why voting by mail was a legitimate thing; why everyone could not just go to the polls. “If you can go grocery shopping, or doctor or dentist or Walmart, you can go to polls to vote, it takes 5 minutes”, she chimed.
I countered that this was true for her, a white woman liven in Republican suburbia. But, it may not be true for a person who lives in a city, or who does not have a car, or who has children, or who lives in a district where the number of polling places has been reduced with the intent of voter suppression. “Your experience is not everyone’s experience.”
Afterward that phrase hung in my head like a thought balloon. I am a white male who has not had the experience of having my polling place shut down, or standing in line for five hours, or having a child that I would have to have at daycare early, pick up after work, and then take inside the polling place with me if I were to vote before the close at 7PM. Voting for me was easy, so why was I so passionate about mail in voting and she so against it? My experience was her experience, yet, here we are standing on opposite sides of the precipice, yelling at each other.
I don’t know why we have such different opinions; actually, ‘opinion’ is too weak a word, ethos may be a better fit. I don’t know why I empathize so deeply with those who have not and cannot when I both have and can. Am I hard-wired that way; is this a biological condition that is coded in my DNA? Or, is it a factor of the combined effect those who taught me in childhood and lessons aggregated along the way? Is this nature or nurture or some mixture of each?
The answer alludes me but I hope that, if it is nurture, I have planted those seeds and watered that garden in my lifetime.
My Thoughts and the Thoughts of Others 