I made a mistake yesterday. Nothing drastic. No one was hurt. Just a dumb mistake. I wrote a comment on an “article” on the Babylon Bee Facebook feed that raised a question about the satire that was posted. It was a satire piece about an economic system.

I wrote something to the effect that people argue that their preferred one-size-fits-all economic systems always work, when they are tried the right way. Doesn’t matter which -ism you are referring to – socialism, capitalism, etc.

I quickly realized I made a mistake in offering a comment that questioned the unquestionable faith in the -ism being defended. If only people had that much faith in Jesus.

I tried to get out of the comments. At first I didn’t just want to ghost the person and have them think I was afraid of the conversation. That was a mistake too.

Then I quickly realized, what a waste of time this whole episode was and I went off to more productive uses of my time.

Mistake made. Lesson learned.

I’m sure I’ll make the same mistake again in the future – whether on that site, or elsewhere. Maybe the heat got to me. Maybe it was a error in judgement on my part. Maybe it was a bit of egotism rearing it’s head within in. Regardless of the the reason – it was a mistake.

Yet, it has me thinking. Why have we gotten to this stage? Why is it almost impossible to have a conversation online on just about any topic? Why is a question that is raised met with an attack or insult or just rudeness?

I think part of the problem is how we think about issues and problems. We look at them in the abstract. When we talk about abortion, marriage, immigration, climate, money, or any slew of policy debates that exist, we too often approach them as verbal wars to be won, points to be scored, etc. We don’t really seem to care about solving a problem anymore. It’s more about who wins an argument and who loses. The reality is that we all lose in this system.

What if we changed how we talked about problems. Instead of talking about the issue as some abstract thing out there, what if we talked about it as if it affected us personally? What if we talked about immigration as if we were the immigrant? What if we talked about marriage if it were about our marriage? What if we talked about taxes as if it were our money? I think what we would start to see is that the issue is much more complex than the tweets and one-liners make it seem.

And you know what – that’s about as close to the reality of each of these issues as you can get. They are complicated. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to these challenges. Maybe we should stop looking for simple solutions to complex challenges. Maybe we should start thinking about them differently. And consider how lives are affected. And realize that when there are winners and losers from a policy, then we are approaching it the wrong way.