Opinion: We should laugh about differences more

Maybe you’ve read my brother Don’s column, something I run weekly in my Guadalupe County News because, well, he loaned me money.

That’s why we call his weekly column “The One Percenter,” because that’s about how much of my newspaper he “owns,” although we are now locked in a pitched battle over an additional 1%, which he thinks he has earned by bringing in “at least a million” readers, a figure he arrived at using a mathematical formula he made up.

Who says numbers don’t lie?

Fortunately, my brother doesn’t make his living off math. He’s a psychiatrist, and truth be told, some people do in fact enjoy his offbeat rantings. He typically uses humor to make his points, and claims to be great at all he does. It’s his way of saying, hey, let’s not take ourselves too seriously.

On the other hand, I write a more serious column, and I get my own sort of fan mail. A lot of them are actual love letters, if you count loving-to-hate-me as love.

I suppose I have it coming because I’m so serious about things like climate change, legitimate elections, threats to democracy and the like. Thankfully, some of my readers actually agree with me, which keeps me from feeling like a voice in the wilderness, but over in eastern New Mexico and western Texas, they love to hate my liberal pinko commie ways because they don’t jive with their god-fearing ways.

Now, I’ve been a progressive pundit since my early days as a journalist in my Southern home state of Arkansas, so I’m used to people disagreeing with me.

In fact, I jokingly tell people that if they always agree with me, something is wrong with them. What’s more, through the years I’ve had more than a few people who like to argue with me on friendly and respectful terms, and some still do. That’s something I welcome and always try to respond to. But in today’s political and cultural climate, friendly and respectful arguments are becoming a rarity.

And I’m just a pundit. Many others — librarians, election officials, government bureaucrats and many more — are feeling the hostility far more acutely, and there’s nothing funny about it.

The other day, I heard an embattled former library director in a PBS interview talk about some of the hostility she and other librarians have received from members of the religious right. She’s received threats over “unacceptable” books her public library had on the shelves, with her detractors using the wrath of God as their threat.

They basically didn’t threaten to hurt her themselves; instead, they told her that God would hurt her because of her evil ways.

I know exactly what she was talking about. Write about religion or abortion sometime and you’re likely to get a dose of it yourself. Some people use God as their justification for some very ungodly behavior.

If my brother were to write about something serious, maybe he’d put on his shrink’s hat and explain how incredible delusions take root, making light of it with a couple of good jokes. But not everyone would laugh. I think the far right has lost that ability; hate has trumped their sense of humor.

Still, maybe Don has the right idea. Maybe we need to laugh about our differences more, if for no other reason than to keep from crying at the state of our discourse these days.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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