If you're a fan of Black Mirror, you've likely seen the episode where you can block someone from real life as well as your online life. If you aren't familiar with the series, Black Mirror is a version of ourselves placed ever-so-carefully in the future. And this screams a truth I'm watching on Facebook right now.
You've read the articles and you have a stance. You aren't wrong, and you're free to choose to do whatever you want to do.
Here's my choice: I won't unfriend you.
Instead, I will come to your house and have a conversation about my rights with you.
We will have coffee at your kitchen table and we will talk. It will be uncomfortable. Hatred and bigotry is not OK. We need to have this discussion. You are likely a kind person and I don't hate you. But there's stuff we gotta talk about.
Then it will be my turn.
You'll hear why black lives matter, how terrifying and real conversion therapy is to me, and how the VP of the United States believes in such idiocy, why Planned Parenthood doesn't rip out babies like the memes say they do, and how Muslims are not terrorists. We'll discuss this constructively and I won't yell, and you won't either.
And you better believe I am going to remind you that NO ONE WANTS TO TAKE YOUR GUN.
We will talk.
The reason we got into this situation maybe could be blamed on the ways we divided ourselves over the past few years, and I'm as guilty as anyone for creating utopias that are an exclusive audience that agrees with me on, well, most everything. When I travel back to South Dakota, I see blatant racism and pro-hate rhetoric. I bet you see it where you are from, too.
Intellectually, I knew that DOMA and the MN marriage amendment didn't mean that we were done. But in my heart, I believed that we had turned the page. Clearly, we have not.
We need to talk. Much more than we are now.
See you soon.