The Meaning of Ridiculous, "The Argument" - Intelligent People Assume Nothing

I learned the meaning of ridiculous from my mother.

She never used the word. She just showed it to us.

My two older brothers got into it one day. It was a regular sibling fight. They were mad and yelling, and neither one was going to back down. You know how that goes in a house full of boys. It gets loud fast.

My mother didn’t yell back. She didn’t take a side. She didn’t ask who started it. She told them to go get two sturdy table chairs.

They brought the chairs. She had them set the chairs facing each other, close. Then she told my brothers to climb up and stand on them, and look each other in the face.

So there they stood. Two angry boys, up on kitchen chairs, nose to nose, with nothing to do but stare at each other.

It didn’t last a minute. One of them cracked, then the other. They broke out laughing, and once they started they couldn’t stop. The anger was gone. Not settled. Gone. It just fell apart once they could see how silly they looked.

That was the whole lesson. She didn’t fix the argument. She changed where they stood, and the argument couldn’t survive the view.

I had one intelligent mother. I love her for that day and a lot of others.

I’ve been thinking about those two chairs lately. I think we could use them.

Look around at what passes for daily life right now. Politics is in everything. It’s on the TV in the morning and on your phone at night. It’s at the dinner table and in the church parking lot. People who’ve known each other for thirty years are barely speaking.

Everybody’s mad. Everybody’s yelling. And nobody’s backing down.

Here’s what I notice. Most of that yelling isn’t face to face. It’s from across the room. It’s through a screen. It’s a post, a comment or a clip someone shared. We’re shouting at people we can’t see, and a lot of them are shouting at people they’ve never met.

That’s the opposite of what my mother did. She brought them close. Our world keeps us far apart and hands us a megaphone.

And the machines have learned that. The feeds figured out a long time ago that anger keeps you looking. So they serve you more of it. Every day a little hotter. Every day the other side looks a little worse and a little less human.

Nobody planned that as a war. It’s just what happens when a system gets rewarded for keeping you riled. Left alone, it drifts toward the loudest thing in the room.

That’s where you come in. You don’t have to take the bait. You can notice what’s being put in front of you and ask why. You can put the phone down. You can decide your temper isn’t something a machine gets to set for you.

Now picture it. Take two people who’ve been at each other’s throats over politics. Don’t put them on TV. Don’t give them a microphone. Just put them up on two kitchen chairs, nose to nose, and make them look.

I’d bet you a cup of coffee one of them grins first.

Because up close, most of it is ridiculous. Not the issues. Some of those matter a great deal. What’s ridiculous is the way we’ve been going at each other. Grown people calling neighbors enemies. Families splitting over a headline. Folks so angry at a cartoon of the other side that they’ve forgotten the real person.

Satire is supposed to show us that. A good joke holds up a mirror. But lately the satire and the real thing have gotten hard to tell apart. When the news starts looking like the parody, it’s time to step back and laugh at ourselves a little.

Laughing doesn’t mean you stop caring. My brothers didn’t stop being brothers when they laughed. They started being brothers again. The laugh broke the anger, and once the anger was gone they could actually talk.

That’s what a good laugh does. It lets the pressure out before something breaks.

I’m not saying we fix the country with kitchen chairs. But the idea holds. Get close enough to see the other person’s face. Look long enough to see how silly the fight has gotten. Let yourself laugh when it’s earned.

The anger won’t hold up under that much light. It never has.

My mother knew that with no study, no expert and no program. Just two chairs and a little common sense.

Maybe that’s the lesson for these times. When everybody’s yelling, don’t yell louder. Change where you’re standing, look the other fella in the eye, and see what happens.

I’ve got a feeling you’ll end up laughing too.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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