As we approach the presidential election, there has been some increased tension in our community. Differences of opinion about what family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors believe are frustrating folks to an alarming degree. Words of anger spoken in person or online, then shared.

At the end of it all, rarely has anyone really learned anything, and each side leaves shaking their heads at the other. Each believes the other has been misled, has been brainwashed, has not done their research, and proceeds to label the other a fool. I know I am not alone in believing it’s a real shame.

Living in our state where the slogan is “The Way Life Should Be” and in a town that has, since the beginning of COVID, proudly flown flags that say, “Rangeley Rises,” I would hope that during this stressful time, we again can distinguish ourselves by coming together instead of pulling apart.

Rather than succumbing to the expectation the mass culture has subjected us to — one of  negativity, name-calling, judging and shaming — I would hope we would not lose sight of all we have in common: our love for the area, our appreciation of the hardworking women and men in this town, our love for the children who continuously impress us, our pride in our history, and of course the beauty of our precious land, water and wildlife.

A desire for peace is a hope I share with many others, and I thought it would be wise to ask for the guidance of three members of the community about these challenging issues of communication.

Each of them is familiar with issues of conflict/resolution, offer guidance on a regular basis, and strongly believe in always acting with the best of intentions.

I hope their words prove helpful, are food for thought, and maybe spark a good, healthy, productive conversation.

On the first day I spoke to the Rev. Scott Wilson of the Rangeley Free Baptist Church. I informed him of my concerns and started the conversation off by inquiring whether he too had heard of disagreements within the community.

He had.

“Sometimes people say, in their extended family, it’s gotten very hard. ‘We just avoid talking about politics at the dinner table.’ So, they just don’t talk about it. That’s unfortunate,” Wilson said.

I asked him for some suggestions on how to navigate these instances.

“You can disagree, but you would have to disagree agreeably. You don’t insult people. That’s not how you go about it. This is not how we express our disagreement, by attacking an individual.

Other times you know that you or the other person perhaps are thinking emotionally, so it’s best to just step back. It doesn’t mean you don’t hold your position. It doesn’t mean you don’t try to express it calmly, but sometimes it doesn’t really do a lot of good to engage,” he said.

I told him about a person I know who is constantly sharing only angry rants on social media and how I think it’s alienating him from people who could otherwise be his friends.

“I’ve found that social media posts, especially, can be problematic,” he said. “Sometimes they tend to look at social media as, ‘Well, I’m sitting at my computer and I’m not having to face this person.’ So, you give more vent to your emotion as opposed to if you were there with the person talking to them. You maybe would take the time to think through what you’re saying.

“And that’s the thing. If we all stopped and thought about what we were writing to say, ‘Is this something that I would be comfortable saying to this person’s face? Or would this be something that, no, I shouldn’t say it there, so why would I say it in social media?’ Right?

“I think that’s part of the problem with social media. There’s more to communication than just words. You can read an e-mail, and you can attribute a certain tone to it, right? Whatever state you are in when you read that, you are then going to project into the email. Whether that’s what that person is saying or not.

“Whereas if I’m talking to them face to face, I would have the opportunity to notice their body language and say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, let me see if I can clarify.’ So, I think in social media, body language, tone, and other things that go into communicating a message, just doesn’t come through.”

Wilson also expressed his thoughts on the current trend of oppositional conversation.

“Here we have become a culture which doesn’t value a difference of opinions. Everyone has to have their opinion, instead of engaging and listening to other opinions, talking to them. It doesn’t mean we have to agree, but we can then have a respectful conversation.

It’s all about making my point. It’s all about proving me right, them wrong. And so, if that’s your whole basis when you come into the discussion, you’re not really listening. And of course it gets heated, because now we’ve got all of the political ads and the rest, rhetoric, and everything else, which feed into that.

“I think we could make suggestions, and we can say, ‘Hey, think about this,’ but as long as everyone is their own decider of truth, then there is nothing that you can coalesce around. I mean, you could go back 50-60 years in our culture and there were some objective truths we all agreed to. Standards. We could agree, even though we may not agree on how they are implemented, we held that these things were good and true.

“But that’s all been done away with in our culture. Without an absolute standard of truth, it’s very hard to have a dialogue or discussion. And I mean, even if the other person pulls to a different absolute truth than I do, we at least can talk about that. But if everything is always subjectively determined, then you have no basis for which to have a dialogue,” he said.

We agreed that the rules of discourse have changed and speaking your mind without thought to intention has become commonplace.

“We now are people who are unfiltered,” Wilson said. “People think that that’s somehow a virtue. It’s not, really. You have to speak truth, but you have to speak it in love. And there’s a huge difference between choosing it as a club over somebody’s head and using it in a loving, caring way.

“Someone may want X, and I may want Y. OK, does it make you a horrible, terrible person? Does it make me a horrible person? Just means we just have a different view. But we have sort of lost that. The rules of civil discourse have been lost in our culture.”

Wilson spoke of his mindset when interacting with others.

“When I’m talking to other people, I have to view them as having value and worth because they were made in the image of God. So therefore, I need to treat them with dignity and respect, whether I agree with their position or not,” he said.

On the second day I spoke to the Rev. Thom Rock of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd.

I told him of my concern for my neighbors and that even within my circle of friends I was saddened by the tension and the fear I had the closer we got to the election, and the ramifications of that thereafter.

“The circle is a really beautiful image, and I think we’ve kind of lost track of that because of (not) thinking of the dynamic image of an ever-expanding circle. It seems like what we’re doing these days is putting people in boxes, and I think that’s part of the unease that people are feeling. Once we put someone into a box, we’re making assumptions. And we’re making them ‘other.’ And once you make one person, one group, one side the ‘other,’ then it makes it easier to dismiss them.

“But we’re talking about human beings here. We’re talking about our family. We’re talking about our co-workers. We’re talking about the person that shares the pew with us, right? So, I think that what we’ve been trying to do, what I’ve been trying to do, is to just practice humility and live out the basic tenet of my faith, which is that we’re all children of God. And the lines that we’re drawing between each other, between ourselves and others are probably not as distinct as our politics and our news cycle would like us to believe,” Rock said.

I asked him for a suggestion on how to begin to have these uncomfortable conversations in a productive way without simply biting one’s tongue.

“I don’t necessarily think humility means not speaking up and not speaking the truth and love. I think it’s possible to do both. You can be humble, and you can speak the truth and love. And you can give the benefit of the doubt. You can choose to not put the other person in a box and instead be curious. Curiosity is a really powerful tool because we’re not all going to agree on everything. I don’t think we’re supposed to agree on everything. But that doesn’t mean that we ought to be choosing violence, that we ought to be further distancing ourselves from people with different thoughts, different life experiences. I think just the opposite. So, if you’re curious about where the other person is coming from, with an open heart, extending that curiosity, I think that there’s a conversation that can be had. That isn’t happening, right? We are just being barraged on social media into news from all directions, and the message is not one of let’s be curious about each other. It’s a very clear message of either/or,” which again I think is just setting us up for failure.”

I mentioned how so often the community does function as a family, looking out for one another, but then, every four years, we break a little further apart.

“Quite often in small rural towns, with diverse populations, politically speaking, and socioeconomically speaking, and my experience of the small rural New England town is that we are neighbors, we look out for each other, and I think that’s sort of what’s at stake this year,” Rock said. “I mean, it’s not just the election of the president, but I think that’s part of what’s at stake — that long held tradition of neighbors taking care of each other, even if they have different views on X, Y or Z, right? I think that folks who live in small towns, like Rangeley, I think deep down we know that there’s not that much difference between the two of us, even if we disagree on something. And that’s the reality that we need to be reminding each other of right now, because there’s so much noise out there saying the opposite, right? That’s the challenge. There’s a lot of noise out there telling us the opposite and we need to remember who we are. As people, as neighbors, as folks who are lucky enough to live in this extraordinarily beautiful part of God’s creation. Yes, we need each other.”

On the third day I spoke to the Rev. Tony MacNaughton of the Rangeley Congregational Church and the Oquossoc Union Log Church.

MacNaughton too had witnessed a change from years past when discussing politics was more commonplace.

“I find a lot of people are afraid to bring up topics or subjects or share their opinions because they’re afraid of how they’ll be perceived by other people, and it has to start right at the dining room table,” he said. “You know, when I was a boy growing up in our family, we used to talk about some of those things around the table (my father and mother and my brother and I), and they would engage us in conversation as to what we thought. I don’t think there’s enough of that today. People say, oh, well, we don’t want conflict, and we don’t want to deal with those kinds of problems. Someone else can work on them. But it has to start with us. How we react to people, how we treat people, I mean, Rangeley has a lot of issues facing us.”

I told him that I thought that some people might be afraid of the ramifications of their opinions, while others don’t filter themselves at all.

MacNaughton noticed this as well.

“And in a smaller town, people are very concerned about what someone thinks of what they think and, ‘Will people not like me if I share my views?’ and so forth. But the only way I know that things can get solved or at least dealt with is through dialogue,” he said.

I expressed to him my memory of the times when the town did seem to come together, in times of crisis, such as during the start of the pandemic.

“That’s a great example, COVID, how restaurants got together, and food was provided, and help, testing sites and so forth, and just looking in and checking in on people. A small town has the ability to meet problems, I think, better than big cities.”

I wondered if he could offer a suggestion on how healthy dialogue could begin, besides just respecting the person to whom you are speaking.

“Well, if people ask you questions, don’t be afraid to answer and to dialogue with them. Don’t just keep things to yourselves and feel that, ‘Well, I’ll just take my crayons and go away because nobody cares what I think,’ and I do think people care about what we do think. But we have to respect other people’s opinions in that kind of dialogue. You know, I am the summer minister and have been for years at the Oquossoc Union Log Church and we have people of various ideas and opinions, and listening is very important. I think that when we listen to one another and learn about what other people think, we can begin to find a consensus, or at least we listen to what their problems are or how they perceive the problems and say, ‘Well, let’s see if we can work on this together.’ Let’s see if we can. And even if sometimes we’re not going to always agree, we can agree to disagree,” MacNaughton said.

We spoke then of conflict resolution.

“In conflict resolution, I did have a lot of training in that kind of thing, and when I went to seminary after college, there was a lot of emphasis on that, certainly with marital problems and family problems. But I mean, the same principle applies in terms of sitting down with people and listening to them and sharing.

“I can remember when Rangeley had the discussion on the cement plant and not everybody agreed. But we did have forums where we could talk about it, and I think that’s very important. Coffee klatches where people argue or put others down, I don’t think are helpful. I think it’s when we can come together individually or in groups. Small groups are very important.

“Some of these things, a lot of them, just don’t have easy answers, Stephanie. But I do think that you resolve conflict by working through it and sharing and talking. If you put your head in the sand, it just intensifies the problem and often it just divides people,” he said.

I told him that I thought some people might not be afraid to voice their own opinion but were afraid of the ramifications. It might affect their job, or their family. He said he had seen this happen.

“When I was in my first church in New Jersey, I was in a community where there were a lot of oil refineries. The unions would go on strike over working conditions, wages, etc., and management would try to run those refineries in the interim. We had women in our women’s association in the church who wouldn’t talk to each other because their husbands were in the union, or their husbands were in management. And I didn’t think about that, and then you just talked about that, people not talking to one another. And that that can happen. People turn you off and it can affect your children and like you said, not being invited to play times or getting together. Issues can divide people unless they talk about them and have respect for one another. It can be a real problem and that has happened up here. There are people that get on either side of an issue and it separates them, which is a shame,” he said.

I confessed that there are some people who are so negative they seem to be in a constant rant, and so I block them or shut them out of my life.

“Oh, sure, absolutely,” McNaughton said. “A lot of people will just clam up. They’ll keep these opinions to themselves rather than share them, and that can be detrimental to relationships and also to our own health. And then the news on television can be so negative. Our own local news, in the state and county, you just get bombarded with that all the time.”

To this I also confessed that there are some news stations that I refuse to watch because I believe they are fear-mongering pot stirrers.

This did not surprise him.

“No, you’re right. My doctor had told me that when she has a patient whose blood pressure is off the wall she’ll say, ‘Do you watch a lot of TV news?’ and they answer ‘Oh, I watch Fox’, or some station like that, half the day or more, and she’ll say, ‘Stop doing that for a while. Take a rest, walk away, because it’s affecting your health,” he said.

I thanked him for taking the time to speak with me and let him know who else I had interviewed.

“(I) and the Baptist minister and Thom at the Episcopal Church, the churches can provide forums or places sometimes, or just even one-on-one to share in exchange and appreciate the other person and the views. And if there’s a problem trying to work together and through it, there may not be other places in society where you can do that. So, I think in our community, that is one of the many avenues that can be provided for people to get together and share on issues and problems facing the town or their own personal lives. And then people can come out maybe respecting the other person and listening to them, rather than just shutting them off and going on our own way and letting it affect who we are, our health and everything. And that can affect the town too when you multiply that,” MacNaughton said.

This is my final letter as editor of The Rangeley Highlander and so this is my last column.

I thought it would be appropriate to give my two cents.

Thanks for your support over the last 11 years, your kindness, trust and even your constructive criticism. I will miss being included so personally in so many of your stories.

 Peace & Health,

Stephanie