Probably not. The 24 hour news cycle isn't interesting enough for us to not always be on the brink of something, but stop watching that and start just hanging o

Probably not. The 24 hour news cycle isn't interesting enough for us to not always be on the brink of something, but stop watching that and start just hanging out in the real world, and things calm down considerably. A few years back I went to an audio shop to have a car stereo installed. Another patron there was also waiting, and we struck up a conversation. He and I couldn't have been more politically dissimilar, but in the few hours of conversation we had, we managed to bond over life experiences, fatherhood, etc., and while political topics were broached, we managed polite disagreements where needed (though even in disagreement, often agreed over _the problem_ while sometimes having disagreements over _the solution_) and both learned from each others' perspective. I kept thinking if we'd been on Twitter or Facebook, the conversation would have probably started adversarially and devolved from there, and that was around the time I started curtailing my use of social media. Since then, the world has been considerably more delightful. I've never cared about or needed to know someone else's political leanings to make friends with them, and I have friends in real life who share in my beliefs. Others who don't. Some who share, share strongly, others weakly, and vice versa. The fact that we can't seem to manage friendships that cross ideological lines on the internet seems a problem unique to it -- those who refuse to cross ideological lines in person are (in my experience) fewer and further between. So, if something feels or seems imminent to you, perhaps log off. If logging off isn't an option, check out how contentious American history has been in the past. 1919 was a particularly interesting time in Chicago, and at least to me puts in perspective how much worse our daily interactions could be. We've had periods of explosive discord in our history, and those events are largely not being replicated now.