Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
The trouble started the night Jeff, one of the guys I drink and talk about God with, announced that he’d been summoned to court for the Zimmerman trial jury pool. We’d kept politics out of our Wednesday night meetings, which are held on my back porch, the six of us seated at an old dining room table propped next to my broken hot tub (Florida short-sale homes come standard with broken hot tubs). Instead of Bible Study, we call it our Tavern Ministry, and while we were often drunk halfway through, a churchlike decorum had always held sway. Once the case came up, though, decorum collapsed.
I wanted George Zimmerman behind bars. With Sanford, the town where he killed Trayvon Martin, just a short drive from my home, I wanted to know that I’d never run into him with my daughters at the grocery store or on a late-night walk around my neighborhood.
But Jeff wasn’t so sure that Zimmerman was guilty. Another friend agreed. It was complicated, he said. He didn’t get why so many lefties thought the shooting had something to do with race.
“Let’s not go there,” I said. My wife, Marla, had warned me that some of the guys were conservative. But I liked who they were on Wednesdays, and I didn’t want politics to change that. Still, Jeff kept on, others chimed in and finally I said, “O.K., let’s go there.”
We’d been meeting for a few weeks. We’d come together the way men in suburbia often come together, which is to say that our wives are friends. They meet Mondays to talk about God and faith. They use books with question-and-answer guides in the back.
When it was suggested that the guys get together, too, I resisted, then suggested that the husbands could join the wives.
“Guys need to talk about guy things,” one wife said. Plus, she said, the husbands needed friends, people outside of family and work.
I was unconvinced. I had friends, plenty of friends. If I wanted more, they would be liberal, super-educated friends who could do rhetorical back flips over the Fox News jargon I was sure these husbands would spout if politics ever came up, which, were I to lead this group, would never happen.
When it happened, something else happened that I hadn’t expected. Party lines didn’t break evenly. Brandon — who has a concealed-carry permit and has taken gun safety classes — insisted that, based on every Florida law he knew, including the suddenly infamous Stand Your Ground law, Zimmerman was at fault. If anyone had a right to defend himself with a firearm, my gun-toting, Republican friend said, it was Trayvon Martin.
The argument didn’t sway Jeff, who, in the end, wasn’t picked for the trial. But that was only the first time the guys surprised me. Some, like me, don’t believe in hell. And none of them consider homosexuality a sin or have the slightest problem with gay marriage. (We’re talking Central Florida, here. If the Republicans are going to make it as a party, they’re going to have to let that one go.)
I realize now that my prejudices against conservatives were, in many ways, just as uncompromising as the prejudices I’d often projected onto them. They were just people. Not issues. Not votes. People whose daughters go to school with my daughters, whose dogs run away and come back and run away again, whose hands found my shoulders and who didn’t judge, the night I wept over a friend who had taken her own life.
We need to find a way to get along — and say what we think.
Recently, Brandon asked me to help him with a eulogy for his father. It was a beautiful and confounding moment, and I almost missed the beauty of it. He’d texted his request, and a snarky part of me said that you don’t ask someone to help you with your father’s eulogy via text message. Then it hit me that of course he’d texted, because how could he call without crying? I was humbled by Brandon’s request, and haunted by my sometimes too-small capacity to offer grace to others.
Some say there was a time when Americans got along better by not talking politics or religion. But extending kindness doesn’t have to mean keeping your mouth shut. I want to be friends with Republicans, but I don’t want to be friends with Republicans if I don’t also get to talk about why I think food stamps and socialized medicine are good ideas. Sure, I like to fish, but I don’t want to sit in a boat with someone for hours if we’re forced to keep quiet on the subjects about which we care most.
Last year, a friend of mine had to pretend he’d voted Republican so he wouldn’t risk losing his job. A writer friend has made me stay quiet about her secret conservativeness, lest she be ousted from her ivory tower.
This is why we need safe places to talk politics and religion. We need to be able to say what we believe without belittling one another. We need to not pretend that things used to be easier when things used to be easier only if you were white and straight and a man. We need to stop imagining that things will get better if we keep hammering away at each other, because, every time we hammer, our resolve thickens and is harder to chip away at when we finally put those hammers down.
But, mostly, we need to listen. Not every conviction is worthy of respect, but when you hear someone out, you’re forced to acknowledge a person’s thinking and, thereby, his humanity.
If you’ve done it, you know it’s not easy. A guy in my group will say that people on welfare don’t want to work, and if they don’t want to work then they shouldn’t have kids, and if they have kids then those kids should be taken away. I’ll want to shriek, but I know this guy. If his sister lost her job, he’d take care of her and her daughter. If he couldn’t afford to, then he’d want the state to step in. No way would he consent to seeing his niece dragged away because his sister couldn’t pay her bills.
He’s not a cruel person, just someone who’s been taught cruel rhetoric. The failure isn’t one of empathy, but imagination. That single mom could be his sister. He just hasn’t seen that yet.
And before you say that I’m getting preachy, before you point out the condescension bent under the nib of my pen, what I mean to say is that I get his difficulty. I’ve been there.
A year ago, this guy I’m defending? I didn’t like him. And I hadn’t met him yet.
David James Poissant is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida and the author of the forthcoming short story collection “The Heaven of Animals.”