Can't We All Just Agree to Disagree?

Back in January, some of you may remember I posted a piece titled Crazy, Not Mentally Ill. It was a piece I had been thinking about for a long time. The idea for the piece would always bubble up after one person had made a comment about crazies, and then someone else castigated them for talking about the mentally ill so insensitively…or after someone mentioned someone they knew who had committed suicide, and beseeched us to be careful with our words about mental illness.

Each time this came up, I wanted to go into a little linguistics lesson about how “crazy” didn’t necessarily, and didn’t always, mean mentally ill the way we understand it now. But every time I thought about writing that piece, it was the wrong time, because the wounds were too fresh for some people.

Eventually I got around to writing that piece, and had it set to auto-publish on a date that had nothing to do with anything…just some random Tuesday in the future.

I did, however, tell one of my friends who was among the “we use the word ‘crazy’ too often” types that this piece would be coming up in the next few weeks, and that she should look out for it so that she could see my feelings on the subject.

Eventually that piece showed up here, and her response was, “We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this topic”, with a little smiley face.

Wow!

Not only did she say that we’d just have to agree to disagree, but she did it with a little smiley at the end!

Why can’t more of us be like that?

The two of us belong to an online forum where there seem to be way too many people who have a “take no prisoners” attitude about their opinions. They’re right, and there are no other options. They’re right, and they will fight to their dying breath to prove you wrong. They’re right, and if God himself were to come down and say, “Excuse me, but you missed the boat on this one”, they’d argue, and then decide that this couldn’t possibly really be God, because he didn’t share their opinion on the subject.

Worst of all, these people won’t let you try to create a situation where you might both be partially right. When you try to suggest that you might both have some valid points, or that perhaps it depends on where you’re starting out from and your particular life experience, they will ramp up the volume to 11, and insist all the louder that they’re right, and you’re wrong.

When you try to point out to them that there are many shades of opinion on the subject, even within their own group, they will ignore or discount those opinions because they and they alone have the true wisdom.

These people won’t even let you agree to disagree. They can’t leave it alone. Long after they’ve stopped trying to bludgeon you into agreeing with them, you know the desire to continue doing so is still burning inside them like the coal fires of Centralia PA.

And then there’s my friend…my friend who said, with a smile, that we’d just have to agree to disagree on this one.

I get that. I understand that. I can appreciate that. I can appreciate someone who doesn’t agree with me, but understands where I’m coming from after I’ve explained it. Just as I understand where she’s coming from…but disagree.

But, as a wiser person than I once said, just because we disagree doesn’t mean we have to be disagreeable. This issue is maybe one of four or five that we disagree on, while generally agreeing on everything else. Should we fight to the death over this…as long as we understand each other’s feelings about it?

I don’t think so.

Can we at least agree on that?