We’ve all felt it. That flash of contempt when someone mentions who they voted for. The eye-roll. The quiet recalculation of a person we thought we knew. In a single moment, a friend, a neighbor, a family member gets sorted into a box marked them. I want to make a case for putting down that reflex, not because it’s polite, but because it’s the truth. The person who votes differently than you is not stupid, not evil, and not beyond understanding. More often than not, they’re something far more relatable: a human being doing their best with the information they’ve been handed.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Programmers have an old saying: garbage in, garbage out. Feed a system bad data and it will produce bad results, no matter how sophisticated it is. Your mind works the same way. Here’s the uncomfortable part: almost none of us choose our information diet as freely as we think. We inherit it. We drift into it. We follow the sources that feel comfortable, that confirm what we already suspect, that give us the satisfying jolt of being right. If you consume only left-leaning media and dismiss everything else as propaganda, you will build a mental model of the right that is a caricature. If you consume only right-leaning media and wave away the rest as lies, you’ll do the same in reverse. Both people walk away certain, and both are working from incomplete pictures painted by someone else. The tragedy isn’t that we disagree. Healthy societies have always disagreed. The tragedy is that we’ve stopped believing the other side is even reasoning. We’ve concluded they must be broken.

Who Benefits From Your Contempt?

Ask yourself a simple question: who profits when you hate your neighbor? Not you. Not your community. Division is a business model and a political strategy. Outrage drives clicks. Fear drives donations. A frightened, angry, divided public is easy to sell to and easy to steer. There are people (call them puppet masters, call them algorithms, call them incentive structures) for whom your contempt is a resource to be mined. When you dehumanize the other side, you’re not winning. You’re doing the exact job the manipulators need done. You’ve become an unpaid employee of the outrage machine. The moment you realize this, something shifts. That person you were about to write off? They may be a victim of the same manipulation you are. You’re not fighting each other. You’re both being played.

Don’t Feed the Comment Section

Watch the comments under any breaking news clip or live stream and you will see the same pattern: within seconds, before anyone could possibly know what happened, the thread is already a brawl. That is not an accident, and it is not a fair sample of your countrymen. Some of those accounts are bots. Some are paid. Some belong to real people who have learned that cruelty is the fastest way to be seen. All of them are rewarded for it, because the platform measures success in replies, and nothing generates replies like an insult aimed at somebody’s family, faith, or politics. The vitriol is not a flaw in the comment section; it is the product.

So remember what a comment section is not. It is not the public. It is not your neighborhood. It is not a debate. It is a slot machine that pays out in adrenaline, and the house always wins. Do not engage. Do not correct the obvious troll, do not answer the bait, and do not draft the devastating reply you will reread six times before you post it. You will not change that account’s mind, because there may not be a mind behind it, and the algorithm counts your outrage as engagement either way. Close the tab instead. Then go say something generous to an actual person, in a place where your words land on someone who can be reached.

Forgiveness Is Not Agreement

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you abandon your convictions. It doesn’t mean every idea is equally valid or that we should stop debating what’s true and good. Some ideas are better than others, and that matters. What forgiveness does mean is separating the idea from the person. You can think someone is deeply wrong and still treat them as fully human. You can argue passionately and still assume they arrived at their view honestly. You can hold your ground without grinding someone into the dirt. Contempt closes minds, including your own. Curiosity opens them.

A Plan to Reduce the Friction

Good intentions fade fast. So here’s a concrete, doable plan for lowering the temperature in your own corner of the world.

Audit your information diet. For one week, notice where your news comes from. Is it one perspective? Add at least one credible source from the “other side,” not to convert you, but to understand how reasonable people reach different conclusions.
Steel-man before you strike. Before criticizing an opposing view, state it so accurately that someone who holds it would say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.” If you can’t, you don’t understand it well enough to reject it yet.
Ask one more question. When you disagree, resist the counterpunch. Instead ask: “What experience led you to see it that way?” People rarely hold views for no reason. Find the reason and you’ll find the human.
Draw a hard line at dehumanization. Disagree with ideas all day long. But the instant you catch yourself thinking a whole group is stupid, subhuman, or beyond hope: stop. That’s the manipulation working. Name it and reject it.
Never argue in the comment section. Scroll past it. That thread is not a conversation, and half of it may not even be human. If something you read there makes your chest tighten, that is the design working, so close the tab and take the point up with a real person instead.
Protect relationships over arguments. Before a heated conversation, ask yourself: Do I want to be right, or do I want to keep this person in my life? You can often do both, but only if the relationship comes first.
Practice one act of grace a week. Compliment someone you disagree with. Thank a neighbor whose sign you’d never put in your yard. Small acts of goodwill rehumanize faster than any argument.
Model it publicly. Be the person who refuses to pile on. When everyone else is dunking, be the one who says, “I disagree, but I get where you’re coming from.” Grace is contagious. So is cruelty. Choose which one you spread.

The World They Don’t Want You to Build

Imagine a dinner table where people vote differently and still pass the potatoes with a smile. Imagine a comment section where someone changes their mind because they were treated with dignity instead of ridicule. Imagine looking at the person across the aisle and seeing not an enemy, but a fellow traveler who got fed a different set of stories. That world is quieter, kinder, and far harder to manipulate. Which is exactly why it’s worth building. It starts with a single decision, available to you right now: the next person who votes differently, I will treat with respect. Not because they’ve earned it. Because it’s who you’ve decided to be, and because refusing to hate is the most quietly rebellious thing you can do in an age that profits from your rage.

A Somber Road Trip, Ruined by a Sandwich

We were driving from a funeral Service in East Texas to a graveside service two hundred miles away in West Texas. A quick pit stop to pee, gas up, and grab some food. Foolproof, right? WRONG.

The bubble gum meat struck again. You could not chew it enough to swallow it. Nobody could.Thank God we grabbed the freshly made potato Chips and a fifteen-dollar bag of pecans. Fifteen dollars! For nuts! That’s not a snack, that’s a car payment. And in retrospect, three inedible $8.99 sandwiches, some drinks, and a bag of luxury pecans is not a meal. It’s a hostage situation with a gift shop attached.

Somewhere, deep in some fluorescent-lit accounting office, there is a person, and I’d bet my last pecan this person is a vegetarian, who issued a decree: “We shall not waste ANY part of the brisket.” Not one molecule. And you can taste that corporate frugality, my friends. Oh, you can taste it.I ordered their sliced beef sandwich. Once before and was disgusted and then again today at a different location. Because I am, apparently, an optimist and a slow learner. Both times, different stores with the same rodent on the sign, into the trash it went.

This meat, and I want to be precise here, tasted like beef-flavored bubble gum. Minus the bubble. Minus the gum. Just the sad, chewy essence of an animal that died for accounting purposes. Not even a demented Rodent would touch this stuff, and demented Rodents, let me tell you, have LOW standards, they eat F*** garbage!

Now Don’t Get Me Wrong

Am I dissing the iconic rodent welcoming all??? Hell no. Credit where credit’s due. They’re good employers. Clean stores. Bathrooms so clean you could perform surgery in them, and they need to be, because that place moves crowds like a rock concert. Fair gas prices. A hundred and eighty pumps for all the geniuses who fill up, then leave their car parked at the pump while they pee, shop, and try to gnaw through a bubble gum sandwich. Move your car, you animals. The Rodent built you a whole parking lot.

The Verdict from the Graveside

Here’s the beautiful part. After the service, when everyone’s gathered and grieving and telling stories about the departed (you know how these reunions go, somber until somebody remembers the good times), you know what came up? The Rodent, yes the tree knawing dam building rodent that many have come to love and celebrate. It would seem we were not the only people on that excursion who stopped there or one of the other rodent themed stores. The whole family had the same experience. Turns out this bubble gum brisket is a nationwide operation. Every store. Same meat. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.So here’s my humble suggestion. Get the accountant OUT of the kitchen. Or buy your meat somewhere that isn’t the Double Bubble Gum Distribution Center.

I’d have shown you photos of the meat too, but alas, it’s decomposing in a trash can somewhere between the funeral and my last bathroom stop. Which, honestly, is exactly where it belonged. So, imagine slices of cooked whale blubber covered in BBQ sauce placed between two hamburger buns. Since I am not an eskimo and have zero intereste in trying to chew that nasty stuff and afraid if I tried, I would choke, I think gas station sushi might be a better gamble, just saying.

The Sacred Art of Not Serving Garbage

Let’s get one thing straight about barbecue: it’s an art. A real, honest-to-God art. “Barbecue is an art that can’t be rushed. It’s about patience and passion” and somewhere out there a pitmaster is nodding solemnly while babysitting a smoker at three in the morning like it’s a newborn. That’s dedication. That’s love. That’s a man who understands that good meat cannot be hurried and bad meat cannot be forgiven.

Rule Number One: You Should Be Able to Chew It

Here’s the first commandment, folks. You have to be able to CHEW it. I know, revolutionary concept. Barbecue should taste like an actual human being stood there and gave a damn about how it was cooked. Not microwaved. Not scraped off some poor animal that starved to death and gave up on life. And here’s the kicker: the experts agree with me. If it’s “pull-hard chewy” it probably wasn’t cooked low and slow for long enough. That’s not my opinion, that’s science. Delicious, smoky science.

The Texas Standard

In Texas, we take pride in our barbecue. And I mean pride. We’re talking smokers that run for days, using flavored wood chips, pellets, or lump charcoal to develop that flavor, a timeless technique that delivers richly-flavored, tender results and is suited for large cuts of meat such as brisket, roasts, and ribs. That is why a sandwhich cost $8.99.

Days, people. DAYS. That’s longer than some marriages, and it produces better results than most of them too.And the cuts of meat? They should look like meat. Not whale blubber. Not something you’d find washed up on a beach with seagulls arguing over it. A brisket is a thing of beauty, a monument to patience. Treat it with respect or don’t touch it at all.

If You Can’t Hang, Grab a Spatula

So here’s my humble advice to the Rodent Icon or the barbecue-impaired. If you cannot do better, if your brisket bounces, if your ribs require a chainsaw, then step away from the smoker. Go make hamburgers. The meat’s already chewed up for you. It’s pre-defeated. Ground beef is the participation trophy of the meat world, and there is no shame in knowing your limits.Because barbecue, real barbecue, can’t be rushed, and it sure as hell can’t be faked. Get it right, or get out of the pit.

A Modest Proposal (With Teeth)

While some rodents can make a meal out of a tree, humans cannot! Call me old-fashioned, but I believe our species climbed down from the branches specifically so we would not have to gnaw our dinner into submission.

So here’s my recommendation, free of charge. Hire yourself a Texan. A real one. Someone who knows barbecue the way a preacher knows scripture. Send him in as a secret shopper, a food critic of the honorable variety, not the kind who blasts his opinions all over some public blog (ahem), but the discreet sort who quietly reports back to the people who actually care where the trouble spots are. A man of tact. A man of taste. A man who can tell the difference between brisket and a bicycle tire.

But that’s just me. A longtime barbecue connoisseur who happens to be an author with impeccable taste, and a functioning set of molars I’d very much like to keep.Best.

TheTimeDok

The Person Across the Aisle Isn’t Your Enemy