There’s a more important poll out right now than the ones showing Trump’s numbers falling.
Those matter. But another number caught my attention: 69%.
That’s the percentage of New York City voters in a recent Siena poll who viewed Mayor Zohran Mamdani favorably. Whatever you think of Mamdani or democratic socialism, 69% is a remarkable number in an America where getting 69% of us to agree that Tuesday follows Monday can sometimes seem ambitious.
And it got me thinking.
Maybe defeating the right is neither possible nor beneficial.
Maybe defeating the left isn’t either.
Because these opposing forces are parts of the same human consciousness. America has always contained people who see the world radically differently. Humanity has been doing this forever. Different religions. Different tribes. Different philosophies. Different ideas about government, money, sex, family, God, freedom and what constitutes a decent pizza.
And somehow we keep finding ways to live together.
Perhaps the next evolutionary step isn’t getting everyone to agree.
Maybe it’s finally becoming comfortable with disagreement.
I don’t need someone who opposes vaccines to agree with me. I don’t need someone who opposes abortion to change their personal beliefs. Their conscience belongs to them. Mine belongs to me.
The problem begins when personal belief becomes a demand for control over everyone else’s choices.
That works both ways.
A healthy society should leave enormous room for individual conscience while establishing sensible boundaries where individual choices materially affect other people. That’s the hard part of democracy. Not eliminating disagreement, but continually negotiating those boundaries without deciding everyone on the other side is evil.
And perhaps Mamdani is demonstrating something larger than ideology.
Serve people.
Make their lives better. Make government work. Listen to people who didn’t vote for you.
You don’t have to convert conservatives into liberals or liberals into conservatives. Maybe you simply govern well enough that people stop caring quite so much about which political jersey you’re wearing.
That’s where 69% becomes interesting. It raises the possibility that Americans are exhausted by grievance politics. For years we’ve been told somebody must lose for somebody else to win. Red versus blue. Rural versus urban. Boomer versus Gen Z. MAGA versus woke. Neighbor versus neighbor.
Trump became extraordinarily powerful by harnessing grievance. But grievance is exhausting. Eventually even the grumpiest person at the Thanksgiving table wants dessert. Maybe we’re approaching one of those strange evolutionary moments when something that seemed impossibly complicated suddenly becomes obvious:
Just stop requiring everybody else to become you.
Elizabeth and I have been thinking about this while working on JELLYBEANS, a comedy about a young Gen Z couple from very different worlds who fall in love. She’s a college-educated salesperson. He’s a blue-collar garbage-truck welder.
Their wedding day comes complete with some hilariously terrible marriage advice, including an old family legend about putting a jelly bean in a jar every time you make love during the first year of marriage, then taking one out every time afterward.
Supposedly, the jar never empties as passion fades over time.
Nathan intends to get off to a strong start. Then his mother-in-law comes along on the honeymoon. So much for building up the strategic jelly bean reserves.
But that’s enough about our movie, because the point isn’t JELLYBEANS. The point is why stories about people from different worlds simply loving, laughing and living together suddenly feel so timely.
We’re all riding through space together on this astonishing ball of energy, wrapped in the same atmosphere, breathing the same air, drinking water that has circulated through clouds, rivers and oceans for billions of years.
We are connected whether our politics recognizes it or not.
And each of us sends little ripples into that larger consciousness. No big ego required. One ripple doesn’t change an ocean. But enough ripples eventually become a wave.
I’ve been thinking this way for a long time.
Back in 2012, I traveled to Antarctica for The Coolest Meditation Ever, a series of 24 meditations imagining humanity ending war, ending poverty and moving toward a more peaceful and abundant future. Those meditations are still available free on YouTube on the Coolest Meditation Ever channel.
I believed in those possibilities then. I believe in them now. Not because everything magically happens because a Sheetz sits down and meditates on the melting ice sheets. But because before human beings build a different world, somebody has to be capable of imagining one.
Stories do that. Meditation can do that. Love does that. And billions of ordinary people deciding they’ve had enough of hatred can certainly do that. Elizabeth and I think there are enough of us now who want something happier.
Maybe that’s the real political movement beginning underneath all the polls and shouting.
“Out with the old in with the new” never gets old. It’s time for the new.
Note: AI was used in creating this post — like a super word processor to express our original ideas — because we believe in both the power of AI to speed these messages of hope to you and the low energy, low water usage AI solutions to come.
Media, Meditations & Musings 