I think a lot of people believe they belong to one political ideology or the other, but from far outside of the system, I have come to believe the reigning political ideology in America, one that seems to be tearing the country apart in some ways, is what the psychologists call oppositional thinking.

Oppositional thinking is the act of opposing or resisting, the condition of being in conflict, a state of antagonism. Virginia Woolf wrote that the history of men’s virulent opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

I think that is wise. In many ways, our virulent opposition to talking and listening to one another is perhaps more significant than the story of our arguments themselves.

Oppositional thinking – the very nature and structure of our two-party system  demands a placement that is opposite to or in contrast with one another. It is something that serves as an obstacle. Oppositional thinking has meanings related to Astronomy and spirituality also, but more and more, I have come to see it as a political idea, one that does not include or define me or any of the people I know and love.

Traditionally, in human communities, tragedy brings people together.

I’m sure all of you noticed, as I did, that the tragedy in Orlando last week did not bring us together, as some hoped,  it simply revealed in a disturbing new way that we seemed to have lost the ability to come together for any reason. Or to listen or speak with one another on the highest levels and in the most important ways.

Our political system seems to me a race to see who can club the opposition into the ground as brutally and completely possible, leaving in its wake endless resentment and rage.

Passionate and well-meaning people each trumpeted their own agenda in the days after Orlando, nobody was listening to anybody. They all pretty much left behind the suffering of the victims and their families, Orlando was just another battle in the great war.

Why am I writing about this on a blog about a farm in upstate New York? Because politics is always personal, and like  you, I am trying to find a good place to be with it.

And because I think in so many ways my life has become the opposite of Oppositional Thinking, a way of looking at the world that my wife and I have left behind us,  and mean to never return to. It looks like that might not be easy.

A friend of mine, Cathy Stewart, and Jacqueline Salit, who both work to advance freedom for independent political voters in America, co-authored a fascinating piece  last week suggesting that the two-party system has become so arrogant, exclusive and r confrontational that people on the “left” and the “right” can only talk over the heads of one another, and can no longer listen to, negotiate with or understand one another.

The piece suggests that even so horrific a tragedy becomes just another vehicle for declarations, anger, accusation and argument to advance the two major political parties.  Every time I thought of the poor victims and their families, chess pieces in one more endless partisan  grudge and blame match, pushed aside in the raging arguments,  I wanted to cry.

The Salit-Stewart piece had a radical idea: what if all of the presidential candidates – there are actually five of them – made a joint appearance in Orlando to show that we as a nation are unified in support of one another and in opposition to murder and violence? The idea made much sense, in a way it seemed obvious. Yet it also seemed ludicrous,  so removed from our current system and ideas about listening and communicating that it just seemed far-fetched among all the battling.

I reject labels like “left” and “right,” they advance ignorance and narrow-mindedness, I can never fathom why any free citizen would wish to shrink their minds by labeling themselves so narrow a way. Once you embrace such a label, you have taken out a license not to think, but to subject anger and judgement for learning and discourse.

We live in one of the few countries in the earth where we are actually free to think, yet so many people give up thinking in order to stick a label on our heads and see everyone else a hateful enemy. I don’t know what kind of ideology this is, but it seems nothing like what the people who invented democracy had in mind.

There is plenty of truth go around, nobody has a lock on it, but the truth is if you want to talk to people, you also have to listen to them.

I suppose that makes me an independent.

I grew up in urban areas where the only people who had guns were vicious and violent criminals, I live in the country where just about every good man and woman I know has a gun, including me and my .22 rifle, and their guns mean a great deal to them. I don’t know a one that doesn’t want to make it difficult for terrorists and criminals to get ahold of guns, they understand the power of guns better than anyone. I believe strongly that there is a middle ground, like the talks to end the eternal and bloody conflict in Northern Ireland, it will take a long time and a lot of active listening and empathy to resolve it,  but history tells us again and again that can be done if there is the will.

By people who can listen and empathize with one another.

it will not be resolved by argument and debate, that is for sure.

As the two major political parties move farther and farther away from the center and more and more to the outer edges of political thought, they leave me farther and farther behind. My life is not an argument, I don’t care for my politics to be either.  I like solutions and compassion but I’m also hiding out on my beautiful farm, my own shrine to a different way of thinking. I live a life everyone else believed was impossible, and that I believed was impossible.

The political system seems to have nothing to do with me or my values at the moment. Perhaps its time to take out my old photo of Thomas Merton’s hermitage and start building out in the woods. I am feeling quite a bit alone in this season, but I have figured it out, I will live my small life well, and every day.

I will never become what other people want me to become..

If you look up oppositional in the Thesaurus, here are the synomyms and related words: adversarial, adverse, antagonistic, antipathetic, opposed, opposing.

Those are the words that best describe our political system, in many ways a system designed by men as another kind of warfare.

Among the important things I have learned and embraced in recent years are two words that are not listed under “oppositional.” They are Active Listening and empathy – the ability to sense the emotions of other people.

Active Listening is a communications technique used in counseling, mediation and conflict resolution. According to one psychologist, active listening is a way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding.  Others describe active listening as a system that requires the listener to fully concentrate, understand, respond and remember what is being said.

Active listening is taught in hospice work because hospice workers are taught to never give false promise or hope to those on the edge of life. The best comfort you can offer is to listen, not to reassure. It isn’t going to be better, they are not going to live.  That was a window into true understanding of empathy as well as listening.

Active listening changed my life in that it helped me cleanse myself of my own anger and resentment.  It helped me to find love and connect with other human beings. It helped me to know myself.

There is some truth in almost any differing point-of-view, and if you can hear it, you can begin communicating in a new and different way. Active Listening would transform our political system overnight. We are, in the final analysis, all human beings We will live and we will die, know fear and pain, crisis and mystery. There are so many ways for us to connect with one another..

Empathy is the sister of listening. In our world, victory is defined by triumph, often achieved by money, conflict or brute force. Empathy asks us to stand in the shoes of others, to grasp what they are feeling. So this is becoming my own political ideology: learning how to listen and learning how to empathize.

I am too small and too far to change a system as vast and diverse as our gigantic political system, drowning in money and power.  That kind of change seems a hopeless task to me. I believe I can change myself, and perhaps a few others, one day at a time, one person at a time.

Yesterday, Maria and I helped a good friend publisher her first book, and we have rarely felt so good or meaningful as when she smiled in tears and thanked us. Life is good, change is possible.

It was all about Active Listening and empathy. One day at a time, one person at a time.