Boot’s season is coming! reads the ad. Get your winter boot’s at our Early Bird Sale.
I feel sick. Angry. What has happened to us?
This is not the country in which I was raised—a country where such a thing would have earned you a ruler across the knuckles of your typing little hands. As it should.
I wonder what the copywriter was thinking. Perhaps she whispered to herself, I’ll just stick an apostrophe in here. It looks more polished.
Or maybe she got it right, but an ambitious editorial assistant—who spent the entirety of elementary, middle, and high school texting her BFF Alessandra—decided, at the last minute, Oh, this needs one of those dealie-bobs before the “s.”
Did anyone actually think boot (singular) possesses the season?
Was it the Social Media Director who hit SEND without proofreading?
Who do we blame when this kind of thing happens? Who? Whom? Whom. Whom do we blame?
Fine, I’ll admit it: my outrage reflects my own guilt, my shortcomings. I, for instance, suck at who/whom and commas. Yes, there are probably things wrong with this post. Nobodys’ perfec’t.
Which brings me to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a group of old friends.
We sat with sandwiches and lagers on a patio around a big table. It was a blindingly golden autumn afternoon. Everyone was in a fine mood. Hard not to be—the unseasonably warm weather acted, along with the beer, as a euphoriant.
Talk turned to politics, as talk will. We’ve entered an era when rules such as “no politics in polite conversation” belong to the quaint past. Political talk is welcome now, but the polite conversational thing to do in 2025 is to tacitly agree that this— disgust and fear over what’s going on out there —is what we, the gathered Good People, all think and feel. Unspoken: do not express a nuanced opinion or a fresh take on a subject that is obviously decided and closed.
That afternoon, my companions reiterated things they’d read recently on the blogs we all follow. Nothing new, original, or insightful was added; nothing disrupted the group’s nodding concurrence that the world is going to hell, that America sucks, and that it’s the fault of racists, the rich and powerful, white men, and Republicans.
The assembled are all folks I like and respect; I believe the warmth to be mutual. The vibe, however, was such that voicing disagreement with anyone’s comment—or even questioning the premises of certain statements or proposing a different way of looking at things besides flat-out party-line agreement—seemed a terrible idea. Like loudly farting or spilling your beer all over the table on purpose.
I feel defensive enough right now—sitting here with my hot tea in a nice, safe room—to want to emphasize my lifelong allegiance to the Democratic Party.
Moreover, if called to trial, I could provide paper evidence (I saved the programs) of years of sketch comedy in which I and my fellow comedians excoriated the same kinds of bad guys and unjust policies and practices we Lefties still heartily deplore today.
Back then, of course, it was Ronald Reagan we opposed who, along with his spendy, ERA-hating wife, I would welcome contrasted with the bulbous, predatory fat cat we have at the helm today.
Back then we protested military hawks, Rocky Flats, Dow Chemical, and the oil industry (not the defunding of medical research and the arts, or trampling human rights, or shooting at boatloads of people, or tearing down an entire wing of national-legacy architecture while the government is shut down). Other than the specific atrocities, same kind of thing.
Believe you me, on that ten-by-twelve-foot stage at Jeffrey’s Bistrot in Laramie, Wyoming, we (The Ad Liberation Front, we called ourselves) showed the world (or at least our thirty-four audience members) the hilarious side of evil while spanking George H.W. Bush so hard.
I’m just saying, I have bona fides.
Here’s my apostasy: what I long for today in conversations with people whose minds I appreciate is civil disagreement. Debate. Or maybe just surprisingly fresh takes on topics that have become as entrenched and hardened as ruts of the Oregon Trail.
I remember—maybe you do, too—in days of yore lively, stimulating back-and-forths in which the expression of differing perspectives was cause for excitement, at least among thoughtful and open-minded conversants.
You could get shook up, get your feelings hurt and your mind blown within minutes, and sometimes be inspired by hearing something that departed from the script.
I don’t see the point of getting stuck in any way of thinking or talking about issues—especially if other reflective, reasonable ways of thinking and talking are sidelined, ignored, or even vilified because they don’t align with the manifesto.
I never said so aloud because who knows how my objections would have been taken? Fraidy cat? I guess. Anyway, below is the gist (not transcript; gist) of that recent conversation—the one lit by the afternoon sun of an October day, all of us intelligent, curious, articulate people (even if it’s hard to tell in this rendition):
Trump is terrible.
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
What Trump and the Republicans are doing is going to be the end of democracy.
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
ICE is out of control. People—citizens, hard-working, taxpaying immigrants—are being pulled from their homes, workplaces, and schools—unjustly, with no hearing, no due process at all; families are being pulled apart—
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
—and Trump is militarizing the police—
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
—and conservatives are rolling back women’s rights and protections, same-sex marriage, and environmental protections—
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
—but there’s a march coming up next month, and I’m going.
(Everyone murmurs assent.)
Now you’re thinking, Yeah, all those things are true—so how come you aren’t alarmed?
To which I respond: this reflection isn’t concerned with my being alarmed or not. It’s concerned with how we talk with one another about the world today.
We’ve all heard of and been warned about groupthink. I remember discussing it back in tenth-grade Honors English (we read dystopian novels that semester). I found it scary and stifling and kind of horrific.
When I read an article served up by an algorithm that knows my likes and dislikes better than I do—an algorithm designed to make the stories it presents to me the only stories I can see—and I become enraged by that article, am I thinking for myself? Am I thinking for myself when I wring my hands with like-minded others over what is assuredly only part of a larger picture?
Am I Good because I hate all the categories of person my friends hate? Or because I say Amen! to the opinions of those friends? And I mean, not even amen to their ideas—only their opinions because who, among my very smart friends, ever says I have an idea! or Here’s a different way of looking at that, or Hey—what if we could appreciate the whole situation from another perspective? Hardly anybody. What we do tend to say is some version of Isn’t XYZ awful?
But Isn’t XYZ awful is not an idea; it’s not really even a thought and certainly not your own thought. It’s just an easy thing you can say that everybody is supposed to agree with.
People don’t often converse to change things. We converse to connect, to reinforce belonging, to solidify our status within a social group, to hold court, to persuade, for entertainment, and for countless other reasons, among them to let off steam. Commiserating, like gossip, can not only provide a necessary outlet for frustration but also reinforce social bonds and even spark activism. Condemnation of leadership and of those whose values or practices differ from ours is profoundly human and profoundly social, as is the expectation of concord. Still we can’t forget how to disagree, or refrain from speaking our own thoughts and insights that maybe run counter to the approved narrative.
So here’s one humble suggestion for those of us who love our friends but also hunger for diversity of perspectives. It shouldn’t have to come down to just you, bravely blurting out some controversial insight or mild objection to someone else’s run-of-the-mill critique of society, then watching the love fade from everyone’s eyes, replaced by distrust.
It could be an overt, collective decision:
Hey, gang, let’s take a few risks. Let’s absorb a few uncomfortable or challenging perspectives, listen to each other, ask where we’re all coming from, and follow up awkward silences with laughter and curiosity. Let’s accept that we learn nothing by nodding, by avoiding any potential conflict of views. How about that, all of us? Can we try it?
Oh, you’re thinking about the specific personalities in the groups you frequent—this one never listens; that one gets bent out of shape; this one comes across as domineering; that one hates conflict so much she’ll simply stop coming. You’re foreseeing a fiasco? I get it; I do. Let’s agree: disagreement isn’t for everyone, on every occasion. And what I’m envisioning just isn’t realistic; it feels daunting. Nobody wants to be that person who says What if we try talking to each other THIS way, not THAT way? But I had to put it out there.
And now, I shall seamlessly bring it back around: Don’t you agree that apostrophes in the wrong place signal the downfall of language, not to mention society? Everyone here thinks so.
Janna L. Goodwin 