Monoclonal human beings? No, we are not

 

I want to start with a family I know well. Coastal elites would probably call them redneck. They drive big trucks, they hunt, go to rodeos, they vote Republican every single time. MAGA conservative. The kind of people we’re told are anti-immigrant, anti-other, anti-change...... We hear that story on repeat.

But here’s what’s also true. One member of this family told me about a young Indian immigrant who worked at their local gas station. They spoke about him with real warmth — about their small daily exchanges, how the man was doing, whether he seemed lonely. The kindness was not for show. They even invited him to their family Thanksgiving. Yet the attendant’s boss, the owner of the store, also Indian, had warned him not to talk with Americans because “they’re mean.”

That little triangle of mistrust and tenderness says everything. Every side is both right and wrong, kind and suspicious, generous and guarded. The need to box other people is everywhere. We all do it — conservatives, Democrats, immigrants, natives. It’s how fear hides inside belonging.

When I look at myself, I see the same confusion. There are days when I’m impatient, unkind, not nearly as loving as I want to be. But that isn’t the whole of me. I’m also capable of staying up half the night with a sick animal, or listening when someone is in pain. None of us can be reduced to one feeling or one phase of life. We are made of a hundred competing impulses, shifting all the time.

And if that’s true for me — that even when I’m angry, there’s still something gentle underneath — then it has to be true for the person I’m in conflict with. Whatever they seem to be in the heat of the moment, that’s not all they are. When I stop and remember their other faces, the softer ones, something inside me gives way. The fight loses its sharpness. Grief lightens a little. Love finds room again.

When love begins, we see endless possibilities in another person. Later, when the rough edges show up, it’s easy to forget that those possibilities are still there. But they are. We just stop looking.

So maybe next time we meet a Demo-crap or a Trump-turd, we can listen without the narrow filter — start by assuming they are polyvalent, not single-stranded or one-note. Maybe we’ll find that conversation across the aisle isn’t dead after all. Maybe “enemies” could turn into friends without agreeing on a hundred things, just meeting on one that matters: that we all hurt, and that every one of us wants a safe and decent life.

That, too, is part of being polyclonal — remembering that our differences are only one layer of a much larger, living whole.

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