The stickers are beginning to appear, which means that it’s time to put the words out to back them up.

I avoid writing about politics, social perspectives, and other things that people find contentious and difficult because I think that my place as a writer is not to address them so much as to address things that live underneath it – human beings, why they do what they do, how they end up in the situations you find them in, and the various beliefs that I hold about such things.  It’s a dodge, but forgive me.  It’s intentional that I try to keep those things out of my blog, off of my Facebook, and away from my identity as a writer.  You get to believe what you believe, and if you like my stories, you still totally belong with me, no matter what those things are.

For real.

But the world is coming apart.  Don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but… yes, of course you have.  There is an ongoing belief that *this next thing* is going to be the one that tips us all into death and despair and permanent loss of things that we hold dear, and that if we don’t tug on our side of the rope hard enough, it isn’t a mudpit we’re all going to fall into.

And it makes everyone on the other side into an enemy.  It’s tragic and awful that it’s happening, but it’s strategic politics.  If you want the people who listen to you and to believe in you to tell everyone around them how *much* they believe in you, you make sure that your message, your positions, your *existence* is key to their ongoing happiness and survival.  It centers the whole world on them, and it doesn’t really care what it rips apart in the meantime.

And we kind of feel helpless about it, here in the ripped-up middle.  Relationships that used to be really important and contribute to our happiness and belonging in society are now nothing but conflict.  It isn’t *safe* to be around people you disagree with, because it’s inevitably going to be a fight where both sides accuse each other of terrible things and you leave not really liking each other anymore.  So you only hang out with people you agree with, your circle gets smaller, and while you might miss the people you’ve lost, it wasn’t a choice to walk away from them: it was simple and unavoidable self-preservation.

And the destruction rolls on.

Because now you don’t *know* anyone who disagrees with you, and clearly all of those people are dangerous and wrong, and – sadly – easier to overlook what *they* are afraid of losing because it simply doesn’t matter to you.  We breed our social empathy out of society, and become increasingly incapable of *anything* but fighting.

I see it.  I feel it.  And then it showed up in a story.

I did not do this on purpose.  I hadn’t even realized what it was until a pair of characters who had absolutely no existing relationship, no reason to dislike each other, and who would have naturally gotten on quite well found themselves in conversation about why their respective sides were on the verge of killing each other, and how helpless they were to do anything about it.

And I went: whoa.  Yeah.  I live there.

How do you solve it?

I had no idea.  Clearly.  I have no idea how to solve the massive social issues we’re dealing with globally, either.  I don’t even try, mostly.  I write books, I love my friends, I take care of my family, and I try to keep my perspectives from being conflict.  They remain my opinions, but they should be *ideas*, not *conflicts*.

Which isn’t solving anything, really.

But the story demanded it, and the characters were desperate, and they had to keep talking for any of us to figure it out.

But this is where it landed.

If you want to save the world, drink tea.

It doesn’t *have* to be tea.  (In Verida, it is.)  But the exercise of sitting down with people and doing something that is culturally familiar to all parties?  That’s *magic*.

Drink a beer.  Drink coffee.  Talk sports.  Do something that unites *your people* and lets them be in a space where they all belong there.  And then refuse to let the conflict destroy that space.

It’s not easy.  It’s a fight, and it means fighting for it.  But it is rewarding.  And it’s worth it.  Love people the way that you want your dearest friends to be loved, regardless of whether they deserve it, make a space where you can enjoy people’s company and form a social bond, a social fabric, with them, and when the politics show up and start trying to slice it all back away again: remember.

Drink tea.

You can’t fight your way to social stability.  You can’t fight your way to friendship and trust.

You defy fighting by prioritizing the things that make us *us*.

And I got to the end of the book and had an idea that this was kind of an important thing.

So I made stickers.

I have lots of stickers.  The modern world has offered me an opportunity to make as many stickers as my greedy little heart desires, and we just keep on designing them, because I love them.

But the Drink Tea stickers are special.  They *mean* something.  And I’ve asked my readers, the ones that find that idea resonant, to take some of those stickers and put them out into the world.  A quiet revolution and a rebellion against the political conflict that is genuinely (genuinely!) shaped to separate us as much as possible so that it’s easier to frame every political event as an existential one.

I’m not saying they *aren’t* existential.  You get to believe what you want about that.  I’ll even talk about it with you, as a not-a-writer, private person.  I have lots of thoughts.

But what I *am* saying is that I still want to drink tea with you.  I think that you are a person worth knowing, worth enjoying, worth being around, no matter what you think, and that making those relationships the more important thing is the best and only weapon we have against the things that are trying to destroy what matters.

Drink tea.