A reflection

In two days, the election will finally be over.

In two days, the United States political system will undergo a major upheaval.

I don’t believe I need to stress the importance of getting out and voting for the candidate that you so desire (as it is an important civic duty and so on and so forth…).

So I won’t.

I instead want to touch on something both very related and very unrelated to political machinations at the same time: Friendship.

Yesterday, I was confronted with the stark realization that one of my friends- a young man who I’d met a while ago, but only recently began to get to know- might not be voting at all. It’s his right, of course, and I know that his vote will not sway the election results either way, but I was shocked.

My social sphere includes people who are, in many ways, very much like me. Birds of a feather flock together, you know. Social groups form and I begin to stop seeing my group as the uniform, homogeneous group it actually is, and start to see those not in my group as similar, almost stereotypically.

This is the in-group/out-group bias, and it’s been heavily investigated. It’s partially responsible for a lot of ignorance and abuse in the past and present, and it’s as deeply entrenched in our minds as it can go.

The presence of this cognitive bias within me, as well as additional factors that society has saddled me with, means that I- like all of us- am in danger of forming an echo chamber. My friends and my environment can become this sort of space in which I only hear what I want to hear and I only conceive of what I want to conceive.

In short, I neither grow nor change, but remain stagnant.

Friendships can help to bridge the gaps between otherwise impossible ideological gaps. It’s well-documented, for instance, that Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia were frequent social companions before his death. So too were former president Bill Clinton and current Republican nominee Donald Trump.

These friendships didn’t simply ignore the major differences and opinions their members had; they incorporated the very distinguished capacity to love and feel camaraderie with those that seem the furthest away from you. 

It’s with this sort of spirit that I write this reflection on friendship. My country seems to sorely need a spirit of fellowship, the sort it’s never really had, but the sort it’s always tried to attain.

My friend, your friend, our friends might be sometimes the same as us, but it is absolutely vital that our friends also be different from us. The friction and disagreement of friendship is just as valuable as the support and respect.

And, for all those who have unfriended individuals on social media over politics: I understand that sometimes you must cut off people in your lives who will drag you down, but double-check. These people you’ve left behind may be the ones who can spark your growth and energy.

It might not always be the case, after all, that you’re right and they’re wrong. Sometimes, you need the olive branch of friendship to see things from a different perspective.