Common Ground: Mackelmore's 'Same Love'

I don't have cable or satellite TV, and the radio time I do manage to get, I'm mostly listening to NPR or the local Catholic station. I could write posts on those radio stations alone. I could write posts on all the posts I haven't written...I have done that. 

But what I'm getting at is this, perhaps I have been living under a rock, and all y'all have heard this song on the radio/iTunes 5 million times already, and it's just me standing out here outside the bubble...humming...

It's called 'Same Love' by Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis, but I like this cover/version by Paradise Fears:

Find it here.

It's catchy. It's memorable. It's even poetic. And also wildly inflammatory.

Let me be straight with you (ha.ha.), I don't support gay marriage. But this song has made me think a lot, which is probably one of its aims.  All too often in these heated, no-holds-barred debates on the BIG issues, we forget with whom we're fighting. We focus so much on the lines we have to hold and forget that the people on the other side are people too. 

This holds true for both sides (I'm an equal-opportunity chide-er!). I mean, even the song couldn't refrain (ha.ha.) from painting the opposite view as:

The right wing conservatives think it's a decision
And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition
Playing God...

Excuse me, but that's actually *not* what I think. (But that is probably a whole 'nother can of worms.)

I don't agree with the lifestyle this song promotes.  I don't think there should be homosexual marriage. I don't like the picture the song paints of those who feel the way I do. BUT, it does teach me something. We could all get a little further in life, in loving our neighbors, in getting our points across, when we take the time to put faces on the so-called other side. 

My weekly Radical Life email today emphasized this exactly.  Everyone we hate, each person who views the world differently than us, has his/her own inner battle:

It's probably a quiet, hidden battle that you'll never fully understand or perhaps ever know about. Their cry for help manifests itself as selfishness or closed-mindedness. As anger, defensiveness, ignorance, pride, aloofness, insecurity, rudeness, disinterest or malice.
Let all of that remind you that they are fighting a great battle. Be kind. 

"Be kind to everyone you meet, for every person is fighting a great battle." --St. Ephraim 

  --Matthew Warner, The Radical Life

The right-winged-closed-minded-bigot you hate for hating you...doesn't.  The screaming-feminist-child-murderer...isn't. There is history and hurt behind the eyes of the one whom you think you know so well. That guy with same-sex attraction was bullied for years. That woman with the "my body my choice" sign had an abortion that broke her heart. There are stories behind the slogans.

There is more to this than the cliched, "Can't we all just get along?".  We aren't ever all going to get along if we keep fighting in the same old ways. We have chasms between our worldviews at times, but it's time to recognize the face on the other side.  

He is our brother.