bullrun3It is not lost on me this week that I live but a few miles from the site of the first battle of our civil war. No doubt the creek I stare at each day from my kitchen windows was once trod by both the blue and the gray; men who shared the kinship of country and yet also the enmity of war.

We like to think our current world is too refined, too developed, and too safe to see such sights again in this land. The violence that once tore this country apart and cost the lives of at least 1 million Americans is a mere memory and tale of the past.

But I can’t shake the image of those men and women of Washington society who packed up their picknicks one morning and headed out for a country carriage ride to watch what they assumed was just a mostly harmless chapter in the political debates of their age. What were they thinking that morning? What were they seeking?

An entertaining diversion? A laugh? An easy answer to the country’s problems? A sense of satisfying superiority against the other side?

One thing I know they weren’t expecting was the extent of the destruction, division, death, and chaos that followed.

There, on the very dawn of the bloodiest conflict that this nation has ever known, was just a group of refined men and women who thought they could have a little fun witnessing a skirmish of partisans and then go on with their lives unchanged. To them, on that morning, the reality of what that conflict so infamously became was foreign and unthinkable.

I believe we must be very careful in these times. Perhaps open war is still a distant or unlikely reality, but the nature of our divisions is stark and alarming. We must be on guard for the ways that we are increasingly coarsened to the callings of our common life, our common good, and our common virtue.

I see little point in trying to convince each other about our differences right now. What language can we even use with one another when we have our own sets of facts, our own headlines and news outlets, our own moralities, and our own truths?

There is no clear right in these confusing political times. At least not in the choices before us within this temporal kingdom. And if someone tells you they know for sure which side is best beware them most of all.

But what we can do in the midst of our conflict is choose empathy. What we can do is choose to see the inante dignity of all men and women, most especially within each person with whom we disagree. What we can do is choose first to listen and then, when the time is right and the message vital, we can choose to speak truth with love.

We can choose a path of caution. Caution with our protests and caution with our accolades. Caution with the battles we seek to wage and the swords we choose to draw. Caution with our words and our memes and our thoughts and our actions.

Lest one morning we wake up to laugh at twitter or duel on facebook or demonstrate in our streets only to find that our war of words has turned into something all the more darker, something all the more painful, something we can’t just take back, something we will all regret.

Originally published here on Facebook, January 19th, 2017.