I've been pretty vocal about keeping your personal politics out of your writing. After all, why alienate nearly half of your potential audience before they even pick up your work? I've worked hard to not allude too much to my own political viewpoint, and I've written different missives from various political and religious viewpoints just to see if I could pull it off. However, I'll bet that even now someone is searching through both those posts and this paragraph to see if he or she can determine my political leanings and see if those leanings line up with the way that person thinks they should.
You see, it's not enough nowadays to just keep differing political opinions out of our work - we now have to hold the "right" views in our personal lives and our personal dealings if we want to maintain peace. I recently lost a fellow writer/friend who I'd been talking to for over ten years because I didn't toe the line that person thought I should. Now, I didn't really know this other person outside of his work, but we both seemed to have similar personality quirks, and I enjoyed his tomes. In the current climate, though, he'd had enough with my not agreeing with him on every point. He claimed it wasn't because of my view, but that I'd gotten personal. What I did was chime in on a post he'd written that he admitted he wrote with me in mind. Both of us being bullheaded, I responded to him the way I usually do to those who show they want to lecture rather than engage in dialogue - I gave it right back to him in the same way, only I upped the dial(I'm not one to tolerate lecturing or condescension without charging right back). He then said he had to cut me off and that he'd been wanting to do it for more than two years. This person is on the opposite end of every political and religious viewpoint I hold, but we got along due to our both being writers and dealing with some of the same issues in life. I thought we could overcome our political differences(which we'd done multiple times previously), but I think the polarization has simply gotten too extreme. My (former) friend appears to think one cannot be a good or moral person if one takes the other point of view, which is asinine. Yes, there are some things that indicate such - being an out-and-out racist, calling for genocide, liking Justin Beiber - but most of our differences aren't on that scale, and equating normal political thought in America with Hitler, Stalin, Cthulu, or Satan shows a narrow mind and no understanding of either history or scale. Is it really asking too much that we keep our disagreements to the issues and not delve into name calling because we have to cast a differing point of view as OMG THE MOST EVIL THING EVERRRRRRRRRR?
I've run across some publishing houses and others in the writing/publishing industry who won't even give the time of day to someone who holds a different point of view. I personally know someone who was previously published and went into a publishing house but got kicked out because he said he didn't want to talk about politics. He didn't even take a different viewpoint, but when the agent said he wanted to discuss why (insert generic politician here) was the most evil thing to walk the face of the Earth, this person simply said, "I'm here to talk about my work, not politics," my buddy got the old heave-ho. So now we can't even maintain peace through silence?
This is why Schism will be such a timely book. The more and more I see how we've tribalized ourselves, the more I'm convinced we're headed down the road of true civil strife, if not civil war. I dislike being such a Debby Downer, and I desperately hope I'm wrong, but I see the seething hatred coming from everywhere and I don't know if we can avoid it. We should be able to hold wildly divergent views and still be able to be friends at the end of the day. But as too many these days demonstrate, including my former friend, that just doesn't seem possible.
You see, it's not enough nowadays to just keep differing political opinions out of our work - we now have to hold the "right" views in our personal lives and our personal dealings if we want to maintain peace. I recently lost a fellow writer/friend who I'd been talking to for over ten years because I didn't toe the line that person thought I should. Now, I didn't really know this other person outside of his work, but we both seemed to have similar personality quirks, and I enjoyed his tomes. In the current climate, though, he'd had enough with my not agreeing with him on every point. He claimed it wasn't because of my view, but that I'd gotten personal. What I did was chime in on a post he'd written that he admitted he wrote with me in mind. Both of us being bullheaded, I responded to him the way I usually do to those who show they want to lecture rather than engage in dialogue - I gave it right back to him in the same way, only I upped the dial(I'm not one to tolerate lecturing or condescension without charging right back). He then said he had to cut me off and that he'd been wanting to do it for more than two years. This person is on the opposite end of every political and religious viewpoint I hold, but we got along due to our both being writers and dealing with some of the same issues in life. I thought we could overcome our political differences(which we'd done multiple times previously), but I think the polarization has simply gotten too extreme. My (former) friend appears to think one cannot be a good or moral person if one takes the other point of view, which is asinine. Yes, there are some things that indicate such - being an out-and-out racist, calling for genocide, liking Justin Beiber - but most of our differences aren't on that scale, and equating normal political thought in America with Hitler, Stalin, Cthulu, or Satan shows a narrow mind and no understanding of either history or scale. Is it really asking too much that we keep our disagreements to the issues and not delve into name calling because we have to cast a differing point of view as OMG THE MOST EVIL THING EVERRRRRRRRRR?
I've run across some publishing houses and others in the writing/publishing industry who won't even give the time of day to someone who holds a different point of view. I personally know someone who was previously published and went into a publishing house but got kicked out because he said he didn't want to talk about politics. He didn't even take a different viewpoint, but when the agent said he wanted to discuss why (insert generic politician here) was the most evil thing to walk the face of the Earth, this person simply said, "I'm here to talk about my work, not politics," my buddy got the old heave-ho. So now we can't even maintain peace through silence?
This is why Schism will be such a timely book. The more and more I see how we've tribalized ourselves, the more I'm convinced we're headed down the road of true civil strife, if not civil war. I dislike being such a Debby Downer, and I desperately hope I'm wrong, but I see the seething hatred coming from everywhere and I don't know if we can avoid it. We should be able to hold wildly divergent views and still be able to be friends at the end of the day. But as too many these days demonstrate, including my former friend, that just doesn't seem possible.
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