When I find myself in difficulties, I look for a calm voice just to hear someone who is not angry, opinionated, hateful, argumentative, or otherwise a stress-inducer in my life. I hope that each of you has someone like that in your life. Often, the calm voice doesn't exist at home, at work, at school, in the media, or any other place we congregate. Sometimes it doesn't even appear in the holy places we attend.
We are awash in controversy, adrift in a sea of counter opinions, and lost amid the voices who all claim to be right when everyone else is wrong.
How did we get here? It might be that we have set up a binary system in the hope that truth will come out of the conflict between two sides. That may well have worked at some point, preventing one party rule and one voice trials where guilt is assumed. Nevertheless, we appear to have lost the concept of the search for truth through conflict. It now serves as much purpose as did trial by combat in ancient times. We have professional arguers who tell us what we want to hear, reinforcing their ideas with cherry-picked facts, loud voices, vehement arguments. We need to grow beyond the new trial by combat. We need to discover within ourselves the calm voice and see where that leads us.
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