I have written three separate blog posts this morning already and published none.

The words cannot seem to find my hands and yet my thoughts are filled with them, too many. I want to call myself out for not doing more. I want to grab our society and shake it until the sense of pride comes back. I want to fix things…

We are the problem. We don’t have an identity as a community. We hurt. We want to believe we aren’t wrong, that everyone else is wrong. We want to believe we are on the right side of the argument. We don’t want to be uncomfortable. So we squabble.  We troll.  We hide behind screens instead of sitting down and figuring it out.

There’s a great story about how two opposing groups, pro-life and pro-choice, have been escalating in their debates. Both groups are invited to attend a two-day session on conflict resolution but they are required to attend the first day and listen only. They have to be respectful of the information and no one is to discuss the subject that they both feel so strongly about. After they learn about how to seek a pool of shared meaning, the second day goes differently – After many questions and having conversation it is discovered that both groups actually have a common mission – they agree that if they could find a way to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies both groups could achieve their goals.

Yet here we are.  Riots, protests, killings, national anthems, presidential candidates, and the list keeps going. Instead of our culture taking a step back and looking for the greater mission, we point fingers and talk about unfairness.

I cannot find the words I want to express – the ones where I have meaning that drills into your soul and reminds you how great the world can be if we got off of our asses more and became part of our community. The sentences that resonate with the fear in you and moves you forward to ask and find out, rather than judging everything without question. The paragraphs the help you remember that this country was never supposed to be about Them and Us…just Us. That we have the power to change our government, our lives, and those around us.

I wish I had the words. I wish we could see each other as partners and peers, rather than antagonists with agendas. I wish we could use the two eyes and two ears we have, instead of the one mouth.

I wish we could find our courage to stand together.