Hope, civility, and a fist bump on the Red Line: Yes, we can ‘disagree better’
They got on the Red Line at JFK-UMass on the kind of postcard-perfect Sunday afternoon in early September that you always hope that Boston is going to have.
The sun was lemonade yellow overhead. The sky was a piercing blue. And there was just enough of a snap in the air to remind us that, while fall isn't on our doorsteps quite yet, it's parking the car and eyeing the distance up the front walk.
He was on a bike, a dustier yellow than the sun. She was on foot. And they quickly fell into conversation. The Red Line train ground back to life and resumed its race down the tunnels heading into the South End.
Me?
I fell back into the latest on the tragic and horrifying death of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, toggling between an analysis of the Trump White House's vows of revenge against the greater forces they believed responsible for that spasm of violence at an event devoted to free speech, and one about Utah Gov. Spencer Cox's plea to put down our phones, touch some grass, and " disagree better ."
It wasn't fun reading.
And after a brutally long and trying week for the country, I got to wondering if we'd crossed some threshold, if we were now so bunkered down that "disagreeing better" was out of reach.
Were we doomed to regard each other with suspicion, staring over the trenches we've dug for ourselves, just waiting for an excuse to go to war with each other?
It sure did feel that way. And it felt just awful.
And then in a moment, something happened that gave me hope that maybe it's not too late.
The train pulled up to South Station, and I got up to leave. The younger man, whose bike was straddling the space between the automatic doors, pulled back to give me room to leave.
"Thank you," I said to him, glancing up, startled out of my reverie.
"Of course," he said quietly. His companion smiled. And then, suddenly, wonderfully, he extended a closed fist. I smiled. We bumped fists.
"Have a good day, you two," I said as I left the train. And as the door closed, I heard the woman offer a friendly "you too."
It wasn't much. But in its own way, it was everything.
And it wasn't the last moment.
On Monday, lawmakers in the state House of Representatives paused their business in an all-but-empty chamber to observe a moment of silence for Kirk.
House Minority Leader Bradley Jones Jr. said he'd hoped the brief interlude was "an opportunity, hopefully, for a reset in the nature of public discourse and civility."
It was a nice thought.
I asked Jones if he feared that we'd lost the ability to talk with each other, to solve our problems without vitriol or violence. He didn't hesitate.
"We have lost the capacity to talk to each other," Jones, R-20th Middlesex, said. "I mean, we see the little things that erode it. One of the things, I think over the years, you know, if I've debated on the House floor, I don't mention people's names. Because as soon as you have names, it's personal. And as soon as it's personal, it's remembered."
"And so you need to find ways to have that dialogue and that discourse —from the president of the United States down to the elementary school," the North Reading lawmaker continued. "And I think it's important to have. And I think, you know, the one thing that, you know, [that] Charlie Kirk did was he would go and have those dialogues face-to-face. That's a good thing."
He's not wrong. I've always believed that hate is based on fear. And you really can't hate someone if you take the time to get to know them.
Sure, if you try hard enough, you can find the stuff you disagree about.
But more often than not, stripped of the anonymity of the keyboard and bound by the rules of face-to-face engagement, you find there's always way more that brings us together than sets us apart.
Because when you get down to it, we all want the same stuff: Good schools, safe communities, the chance to earn a decent living. Sure, we might disagree on the path to get there. But that doesn't make people mortal enemies who need to be defeated and destroyed.
It just means they disagree.
In this pressure-cooker moment, that seems forgotten. And it's worth remembering.
It's the fist bump on the train. It's the Market Basket cashier who talked my ear off about the Patriots and Dolphins on Sunday morning.
It's the person next to you in your church, your synagogue or wherever you worship — or don't. It's the driver who lets you into traffic on the Pike instead of cutting you off. It's the miracle of our kids at the park, playing together, and caring not a whit about politics, or belief or tribe.
It's the countless little moments. It's those instances of our shared humanity that remind us that we're all in this together, even if, or especially because, we don't always agree.
Leaving the darkness of the station on Sunday and emerging into the sunlight in a city filled with maddening contradictions that I love no less intensely made the day feel like a prayer.
And that's the one I'll offer here: That this moment of pain and division passes and that we find a way to talk to each other again, a better way, as Utah's Cox put it, to disagree.
One fist bump at a time.
Read more analysis from John L. Micek
Read the original article on MassLive . Add MassLive as a Preferred Source by clicking here .
