The other day a Facebook friend was waxing wet-faced about his love for Love Actually. He said he watches the 2003 rom-com medley every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which seems excessive even to a fellow who goes rheumy-eyed anytime he hears "Both Sides Now" because God damn you, Alan Rickman (may you rest in peace)!

And on this poor sap's Facebook thread some critical thinker decided to comment, "So do you have an impassioned rebuttal to all the recent Love Actually backlash?"

What recent Love Actually backlash?! Don't tell me, I don't want to hear it.

For a people that's characterized as a bunch of cowards cocooned our own social media bubbles or silos or echo chambers or whatever, we sure do get precious little political peace anymore.

Is it just me?

I have friends to the left of me who can't believe I have so many friends on the right, and friends on the right who can't believe anyone could possibly be to the left of me. I can't believe it either. With a nod to Paul Simon: When I think back on all the crap I've heard on C-SPAN, it's a wonder I can think at all. (Which is part of the problem, of course. All this news-gaping has turned us into pundits rather than people. If you ask a ditch digger who she wants to win the Democratic primary, she'll give you an analysis of how each candidate will fare with the suburban moms in fucking swing states. I asked you who you wanted!)

My political influences—people with whose political opinions I have to regularly rassle—include:

A retired midwestern school teacher who convinced me years ago that, however exciting it might be economically, global capitalism will destroy the environment.

A southern preacher's son who believes sincerely that many liberals are out to silence and destroy everyone who doesn't embrace their progressively politically correct ideology.

A friend who urged me to vote against Chicago mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot last spring because she was "weaponizing" her black skin and her homosexuality to promote a monstrous conservative agenda.

A grown-up South Side Chicago police detective's son who hated President Obama so much I had to turn away in disgust, but who hates President Trump—and "Trump humpers"—with sufficient heat to keep my hands warm.

Not long ago, an old lefty pal invited me to an event on the anniversary of the police murder of Fred Hampton, but I couldn't go because I was interviewing a former speechwriter to Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

Just in the last week:

An artist pal used Facebook to encourage holiday card makers to stop using glitter, because it's "the herpes of the crafting world," made of mylar plastic that winds up in the oceans.

Another Facebook friend posted an article titled, "Is Trump the Only Adult in the Room?" adding the comment, "Leading in spite of chaos."

I drank over the weekend with a woman who runs a writing program in a prison and feels ambivalent about visiting lectures from prominent white authors who have written famous books about African Americans in the prison system. Because why do privileged white people always get to tell poor black people's stories—and make money in the process? And lest you dismiss my friend as a one-eyed pipsqueak liberal, her godfather was actually William F. Buckley.

(She reminded us that Trump is pretty popular among prisoners and their families because his First Step Act is letting thousands of people out of jail.)

Over the weekend I ran across a famous video of the virulent anti-gay activist Anita Bryant getting a pie in the face at a Des Moines press conference in 1977 from a gay activist. Bryant's husband, sitting next to her, told her to pray for the man, which she did, before breaking into tears. I sent the thing to my gay feminist sister-in-law, who then became the first gay person I've ever heard take Bryant's side. "Anita should have first punched the guy who threw the pie," Sis wrote, "then punched the guy sitting next to her." 

As the editor of Vital Speeches of the Day and author of the forthcoming book, An Effort to Understand, it's part of my work to seek out a variety of opinions. But reading the above, I bet you relate to reeling from dueling opinions from people you respect. The circumstance isn't new,  of course: F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

But these days it feels like a dozen new opposed ideas a day, and it's overwhelming and exhausting, even to distance runners like you and me.

Last week, I had a phone chat with a close speechwriting colleague who wrote a masters thesis on Bobby Kennedy when he was young in the early 1970s, then went to work in Republican politics and has devoted most of his career to a Washington lobbying organization of great importance and with strong bipartisan ties. "I can't watch the cable news shows before work in the morning," he confessed with a sense of sad astonishment. "I find myself watching reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond."

Or as it's called now, Some Folks Find Raymond Problematic. 

If we're going to live in bubbles, for godsakes let's build them out of sterner stuff. 

I felt an increasingly familiar annoyance yesterday when a speechwriter posted a link to an article in my Vital Speeches of the Day LinkedIn group under his own headline: "Buried beneath the Ukraine hysteria, news of real consequence."

Because I'm working on a book titled, An Effort to Understand, lots of people seem to think I'm one of these mincing "civility" twerps no one can stand. I find myself spending a lot of time convincing you (and reminding myself) of the difference between surface "civility" and honest communication.

But we do need a modicum of the former to facilitate the beginning of the latter.

If you call yourself a communicator—because you're a professional writer, or the head of an association of professional speechwriters, or just a person who was told as a kid, "united we stand, divided we fall"—I think you shouldn't indulge in purposely insulting, dismissive language these days. Not casually, anyway.

This is rich, coming from a writer who spent his 20s falling in love with H.L. Mencken, who purposely, bombastically and hilariously dismissed whole swaths of the country—the South, for example—merely in order to "stir up the animals," as he put it. And the same guy who delighted in reading—and to an embarrassing extent aping—Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote that the nation was largely populated and ruled by greedy "waterheads" and "pigfuckers."

My first boss Larry Ragan followed the P.T. Barnum dictate: "If you want to draw a crowd, start a fight." He once made an offhand remark in his newsletter that drew letters from one third of the readership. I still don't mind a healthy argument. And a healthy argument still puts butts in seats; witness the effect on Writing Boots readership of my analysis of Greta Thunberg's speech a couple weeks ago.

But it seems more and more important to incite one's battles carefully.

For instance, these days I cringe when communicators on my Facebook feed (and thus in my political tribe) call all Trump supporters idiots. Do they think they're doing more good (perhaps giving their friends the courage of their convictions) than harm (making it just that much harder for American reconciliation after Trump is gone)?

And what was the speechwriter who posted in my forum attempting to achieve by offhandedly referring to "the Ukraine hysteria"? Does he incorrectly assume all our readers think the Ukraine story is hysteria? Or is he aiming at those of us who take the Ukraine story seriously, and starting his persuasive appeal with a backhanded slap across our mouth? Or is he in Social Media Magical Thinking Mode, where you post stuff and picture only friendly followers seeing it, and the rest of the people not seeing it?

In any three of those scenarios, the speechwriter is not thinking like a communicator. If he's thinking at all, it's like an instigator.

And boy, have I loved me some instigators in my day.

Not these days, though.

These days, we need communicators. Careful communicators, who seek more constructive results than "stirring up the animals."

Because the animals are already stirred up.

Onetime Reagan White House (and Gen. Colin Powell) speechwriter Hal Gordon shared this post last week, at the beginning of the Ukraine shit show:

In his post today, conservative commentator Rod Dreher perfectly captured what it's like to be conservative under Donald Trump. I quote: “Last weekend I wrote about a situation in my neighborhood, in which a beleaguered 60-year-old woman lives with her mentally ill, violent, abusive son, a 6’5″ man in his twenties. It’s a nightmare for her, but she persists in it, because she’s too afraid of the alternatives …. That poor woman is a symbol of conservatives under Trump.”

As a liberal, I could imagine being in that situation, if the Democratic president was corrupt and yet a Republican alternative seemed to me more dangerous still.

During the 2016 election, I contemplated how long so many Republicans had despised the Clintons, and tried to imagine how horrible the Democratic candidate would have to be to drive me to vote for a Republican who I'd loathed for two decades—Newt Gingrich, say. When I couldn't conjure a Democrat that bad, I started to worry that Trump might win.

I'm not saying we should renounce our tribes. But at the very least, we should recognize their power in our own lives.