Today, I walked to my polling place with a small group of my neighbors.
The morning air was crisp and clean, full of the distinct, invigorating sharpness that makes an early autumn walk feel unhurried. One mile there, one mile back, our footsteps fell into an easy rhythm along sidewalks flanked by century-old oak trees whose heavy boughs were just beginning their deliberate turns toward amber and deep gold.
Along the way, we talked about the immediate, tangible world around us: the meticulous restoration work on a pair of nineteenth-century stone facades, the pleasant shift in the weather, and the welcome promise of a hot cup of coffee on the return trip.
What went completely unsaid, however, was far more striking to me.
In a cultural climate saturated by anxiety and round-the-clock political posturing, not one person asked how another intended to vote. No one tested the waters for ideological alignment. No one slipped in subtle commentary designed to sway or nudge. We did not discuss candidate platforms, poll margins, or the supposed existential ruin promised by either side of the outcome. We walked together simply as neighbors performing a quiet, shared civic duty.
Years ago, my civic life demanded friction. In my youth, duty was measured in picket signs, sit-ins, and once, handcuffing myself to an iron fence to make a point. But over time, the relentless noise of our political landscape wears on the spirit; today, my emotional constitution is far too tattered for the barricades, the barrage of donation requests, or the pressure to turn every conversation into a battleground.
What remains—the one thing I can do, and the one thing I will always do—is read the ballots, weigh the amendments, and vote. At the end of the day, in a self-governing society, the fundamental mechanism is remarkably unadorned: citizens stepping out of their private lives, walking down the street side-by-side, and exercising that franchise. It isn’t a battlefield; it is an easy, quiet, and profound privilege.
Yet as we moved through the neighborhood, the surrounding world told a very different story.
Cars slid past, drivers hermetically sealed alone behind tinted glass and rolled-up windows, isolated from the morning breeze. Outside the polling place, people stood waiting in line with earbuds firmly in place, eyes locked downward at the cracked pavement, seemingly without any appetite to engage with the community standing right beside them.
I couldn’t help but wonder what drove that quiet detachment. Was it fear that someone might ask a question? A defense mechanism against an awkward confrontation or an unwanted debate? We have become so accustomed to treating public spaces as minefields that we slip on modern armor—screens, headphones, locked vehicle doors—to protect ourselves from the very people who share our streets.
Lately, I’ve been reading through Greek mythology, and walking home this morning, an ancient concept kept surfacing: Eris, the goddess of discord and strife.
The ancient Greeks, particularly Hesiod in his Works and Days, recognized something subtle and vital about Eris: she had two distinct faces. The first was positive—a spirit of healthy competition, craftsmanship, and honorable striving that urged people to work harder, innovate, and cultivate their talents. The second Eris, however, was bitter and toxic. She was the personification of petty bickering, endless grievance, and conflict for its own sake.
Engaging in needless arguments that can never move another person was seen by the Greeks as actively feeding this darker sister. The ultimate consequence was not simply a ruined conversation; it was total social destruction. It was, after all, Eris’s petty vanity dispute over a golden apple that set rulers against one another and ultimately left the great walls of Troy in ashes.
Zeus might not strike a stubborn neighbor down with lightning over a political argument, but the Greeks believed the gods punished communities plagued by Stasis—factional civil strife—by letting them rot from within, inevitably sliding into ruin or tyranny. When neighbors view one another as adversaries rather than fellow citizens, the civic fabric simply dissolves.
When I finally stepped back inside my front door, warm coffee in hand, the first notification waiting in my inbox was an editorial pick from The New York Times:
"Neanderthals were more sophisticated than we once thought.”
The timing was almost uncanny. For decades, popular culture comfortably caricatured Neanderthals as crude, dim-witted brutes—intellectually primitive, emotionally flat, and fundamentally inferior. It was a convenient intellectual shortcut: reduce the “other” to a caricature, and you are entirely absolved from having to understand or respect them. Yet year after year, archaeology dismantles that arrogance, discovering their pigments, their deliberate burials, their care for the wounded, and their intricate toolmaking. They possessed depth, nuance, and complexity that modern humans simply refused to acknowledge for generations.
The parallel to our present civic moment could not be clearer.
In our fractured political ecosystem, we routinely reduce those who see the world differently into convenient primitives. We chalk up their beliefs to ignorance, malice, or simple foolishness, quickly deciding that anyone whose compass points elsewhere is somehow “less than.”
Civility does not demand political uniformity, nor does it ask anyone to surrender their deepest convictions. It asks for something both simpler and far more demanding: the quiet humility to recognize that the neighbor walking beside us possesses a mind as rich, complex, sophisticated, and worthy of dignity as our own.
The path forward isn’t paved with louder arguments, sharper rebuttals, or deeper trenches. It begins on a sidewalk under century-old oaks, sharing a brisk morning, a warm cup of coffee, and the simple honor of doing our part in peace.
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