Commentary: How are We Going to Put the Pieces Back Together?

By Darrell Ehrlick for the Daily Montanan

A frayed flag flies in Carbon County. (photo by Denise Rivette)

His note was not unlike many others that I frequently receive:

Lol, does your dumb liberal ass really think that’s a fact? Every other poll has sheehy up by 6-8% and you f—ktards think it’s a dead heat. How pathetic can you get. F— off

I don’t know who this reader named John is, where he lives or what he does. That may not even be his real name. All I know is that he read a story that I had written about the 37th Annual Mountain States Poll, and reported what it said: The race between incumbent U.S. Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, showed a statistical dead heat with his Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy.

By my count, we’ve covered more than a dozen polls in the past year, and this is the only one that is being released in Montana with about a week before the votes are counted.

In case someone like John took umbrage to the conclusions, the entire poll’s results, with cross-tabs, was included right below the story.

To be truthful at this point in the election season, having been immersed in the never-ending cycle of vitriol and recriminations, I am ready for it to be over, no matter what any poll says. I’d imagine I am in good company.

Truthfully, I am even less concerned about which exact candidates will win. Not that I don’t have my preferences, but that’s what a ballot is for. Now, the democratic process will complete itself, after the people have spoken at the polls.

What concerns me more isn’t John or any other vaguely threatening or offensive email I’ve received, and believe me, there are plenty. Instead, it’s what John’s email represents: An anger so close to the surface that it just seethes from the message, a quick response to a stranger he — to my knowledge — hasn’t met or doesn’t know.

I don’t know anything about his parents, but I do know how I and others nearby were raised. I’d like to think it was not so out of the ordinary. Saying something like that to a stranger would have been unimaginable, and the consequences would have been swift and severe.

Even pushing 50 today, my parents would be disappointed if they uncovered an email from me in which I signed off with an “eff off.”

Our post-pandemic world has brought a crudity and hostility that I fear will be hard to shake. Our politicians have made our anger seem justified and justifiable, allowing us to have tirades instead of conversations. It’s just so darn easy to hop on social media or find an email icon that allows any unfiltered, spur-of-the-moment thought to be broadcast.

We would be hard-pressed to imagine a situation where a person walks up randomly in public and says something identical, but yet, we allow the anonymity of email or Twitter or Facebook to lower our inhibitions, maybe as much, if not more than alcohol.

The easier it becomes for someone to randomly insult or cuss out another person, the easier it becomes to do it again, so that it’s habitual. And if it’s fine for parents or adults, role models, if you will, then it must also be fine or, at the least, predictable, when our children start taking on the same mannerisms.

That’s what frightens me the most. Not that we’ve forgotten which utensil is the salad fork or other points of high society. It’s just that our future, whether we are Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal, gay or straight, depends on co-existing together.

Maybe I should thank John. His note wasn’t the problem, it was simply the symptom. His note simply distilled it clearly and rapidly.

We have really serious problems facing us, but they’re not unlike other problems we’ve faced as a nation. We’ve faced inflation. We’ve dealt with immigration. Heck, we’ve even see foreign dictators threaten to destabilize an otherwise fairly peaceful globe. But, when those times have happened, we have coalesced around the idea that our strength was found in our ability to come together. We had to actively work at putting the “united” in United States.

I don’t know if I have anything in common with John, or any other number of people who send similar snarky emails. Most of them just go unanswered, or filed in the trash, because, really, how much headway can you make if the person starts off believing you’re an ass, and finishes with the f-bomb?

Yet, despite having problems with housing or wanting to discuss reproductive rights and freedoms — all of which are indeed important, pressing problems — at some point, our nation’s success and ability to be exceptional will depend on how much we trust each other, and cling to the principle that we don’t have to agree in order to succeed.

The more I thought about his words — and puzzled out why this one particular email stood out — the more I thought: It seems like it will be easier to solve housing or taxes or electric rates than it will be to reset our ways of interacting and redefine our national discourse.

I am not worried about whether it will be Kamala or Donald. The voters will take care of that question. But, after campaigns are over, it’ll still be people like me and John left to take care of what happens next.