Facebook made me do it.

I saw people that I knew and admired dropping off the platform, mostly out of sheer self-preservation, and I wondered: How will I keep in touch with these delightful homo sapiens? If you’re here, you likely saw my proposal to start a blog, and perhaps you even encouraged me to follow through…in which case, you are now implicated in what comes next (I mean this in a good way!).

This is perhaps the first cracking-open of a chrysalis containing my life to date. I’ve titled it Hyphenated, because this is a term that celebrates those who have more than one identity, professional, avocational, or otherwise, all of which are essential parts of their whole. I’d love for all my visitors not to feel forced to choose a specialization, but to bring their whole selves here to enrich one another.

In the shapelessness of this COVID-marked interregnum, I feel more relief than excitement. This election of 2020 was a reminder, just the latest in a long series of warning signs, that the normative “American way of life” is irreversibly changing, and that there is a very real chance of turning toward ignorance and darkness. When same-sex marriage was still in dispute here in the US, I recall seeing the lever that moved those few Republicans who turned on their party’s bigotry. They did so, without exception, because real people that worked with them or shared family connections would continue to be harmed if they stayed the course - and eventually they decided that they could not look these human beings in the face and tell them that they did not deserve to have marriage built on the truth of their love. To me, this suggests that what we really need is to bring more different people into meaningful contact with one another. People as hardened in their perspective as the Parler-dwelling trolls won’t respond to argumentation nor appeals to emotion; they’ll only be convinced that there’s a larger truth when they convince themselves, based on their own personal experiences.

How can we do this without further burdening the people who have had to stand at the focus of this relentless hatred? What else should we be doing? What does it look like when this effort succeeds?