Tuesday, 05 March 2002 | Debate

For the last several weeks, a coworker and I have been having an ongoing political debate, sporadically e-mailing each other issues and articles and personal commentary. Well, I suppose the debate started longer ago than that, since it was back in August that I anonymously planted a printed copy of this article on his chair while he was at lunch, quietly smiling to myself as I heard him go from cubicle to cubicle asking, Did you put this on my chair? Did you see who did? He never came to my cubicle to question me because, at the time, I didn't know him very well at all, and he probably didn't consider me a likely culprit. I don't know him terribly well now, but if I were to leave a similar article on his chair tomorrow, I'd probably be first on his list of suspects.

Our debate isn't about one thing in particular, but really about everything, since we have yet to find a subject that we can agree on. Mostly I complain about how poorly things are being handled and about the state of the world, and he mostly defends current policy or has vastly different solutions. I tell him that with each day that I follow the news, I get more depressed and feel increasingly helpless, and he says things like, "Please don't be cynical. There has always been suffering, hunger, plague, and war." (That doesn't make me feel better.) We read the same article and get the same information, yet our interpretations couldn't be more opposite.

I think it's healthy, though, having friendly and informed yet antagonistic discussions, as tempting as it is to surround myself with like-mindedness on all fronts. Even if I'm not being converted to the other side, I'm learning about it and how to anticipate it, and, in the process, learning to better articulate my own opinions. We are never going to agree, though. I don't really care if we do.

***

I've transferred his piano music from tape to CD, part of one of the latest giant projects I've created for myself, turning all my mixed tapes into mixed CDs. He always cringes at the mistakes, but for me, they've worked themselves into the music, digging in like termites, modifying the structure so that it becomes something new. If I ever hear other versions of the same pieces, I wait for the bumps to come, and when they don't, it feels like something's missing.