Stop Picking Teams

The fight was invented.

It was invented by the mainstream media.

The media desperately needs you to pick a team, because they need you to click on things. Making you angry at “The Other Team” is the most efficient way to get you to click on things.

They fan the embers of nuanced disagreement into a rage-filled inferno of blind hate.

Each new headline meant to position you against them.

Your hate for “The Other Team” is intentionally and purposefully stoked to keep you coming back, to keep you clicking on things, all so they can sell more ads.

Because ads are how the mainstream media makes money. Your hate, fear, and loathing for “The Other Team” are nothing more than a mechanism to fuel a dying media machine that needs you to click on things.

How does that make you feel? 

…being manipulated, that is, how does it make you feel?

It aggravates me. It aggravates me because, in a world of teams, there is no room for nuance.

I am incredibly nuanced and I’m sure as hell sure you are too.

Nuance makes the world interesting.

The good news is, we have the power to end this manipulation.

STOP PICKING TEAMS

To move forward, to become more than just a click in some advertisers inventory, you must get comfortable with the unpredictable, undefinable, messy grey madness of the middle.

The mainstream media, in its dying gasp, is bludgeoning you with an image of the world that is black or white, democrat or republican, nationalist or globalist, and so on with increasingly more inflammatory positions, each more clearly defining exactly which team you’re on.

Except one position doesn’t define you.

How do you define the pro-choice gun owner? Or the transgender libertarian? Or the liberal nationalist?

The point is, you’re not black or white. You’re black and white… and purple, yellow, green, blue… you’re a mashed up, mixed up, mess of belief and philosophy and experience and hope… and none of what makes you, you, can be (nor should it be) placed in a clearly defined box on one team or the other.

If you can start to become comfortable living in the messy grey madness of the middle, you just might realize that there are no teams… that the idea of “Teams” was made up to generate false outrage and hate and sell more ads.

…because otherwise, everyone stands together, shoulder to shoulder, each their own mashed up, mixed up, messy self.

No teams, just people and the inevitable nuance of our individual preferences.

Please stop taking sides…

Yours in strength,

Hanley

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