If there’s a deep end, I just jumped in.

I have long used endearments when addressing humans I love but also dogs, cats, cows, goats, birds, insects, and yes, the beings most consider inanimate objects. I’ve probably been in above my head for a long time because I can’t help myself from addressing participants in my writing classes as “dear people” and “beloved writers” and worse.

But today I was checking out at the local market. I always put my fabric bags on the belt before loading my items. The cute young checkout person was preoccupied talking to the cute young bagging person, and I was preoccupied with ineptly “tapping” my card, so none of us noticed right away that the bagger was loading my things into plastic despite the sturdy cloth bags in front of her. “Oh, sorry love,” I said “but I brought cloth bags.” She looked up, startled. Then she said, “I’ve never been corrected so sweetly.” She went back to talking to the cute checkout guy.

I recognize calling a stranger “love” is likely a step too far. I know some people actively detest being called “honey” or “dear” or other overly familiar words. That’s their right and I want to respect that. Actually, I rarely use endearments when speaking to strangers. But some people have a gleam so noticeable to me, even if they seem shut down (maybe especially if they seem shut down) that I can’t help myself.

Brief conversations with strangers filled with dry wit, shared insight, and surprising alignment seem to happen more often for me now. That’s a side benefit of getting older. Those of us who are dismissed as irrelevant are, in a way, freer. Who expects to have a moment where they are seen, really seen, by someone who comfortably goes about unseen?  

I used to call only the people I love “loves.” Maybe I’ve watched too many UK series or read too many old British novels, but that word is stuck now. It’s the way I hope to see others — as loves. As beautiful people. As complex and strange and conflicted as we all are.

Seeing others as whole people is particularly difficult when we’re pitted against one another by systemic forces that place seemingly insurmountable barriers between us.

And yet, some people step beautifully beyond these divisions. Last week I read about an LA man who approached a phalanx of federal agents working for ICE, all of them heavily armed and masked up to their eyeballs. Much as I like to think I am a pacifist, I see them as poorly paid* enemies of justice and compassion and democracy itself. The man who approached them was carrying little white slips of paper that turned out to be copies of his most recent two-week pay stub. He walked along the line attempting to pass out these slips, saying some version of, “I know everyone needs a paycheck, but you don’t have to do this.  Come work with us. This is what a union carpenter makes.” 

This man saw these armed agents as fellow human who need to work, just as he does. Seeing others in their full humanity is the heart of nonviolent action. Fact-filled or expletive-filled rants against someone is useless in changing their minds, and is likely to more firmly entrench their views. As Stephen Jay Gould noted, “leave an escape hatch for your opponent so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face.”

Open dialogue with the very people she condemned is what inspired Megan Phelps-Roper to renounce her membership in the extremist Westboro Baptist Church. It’s what led neo-Nazi skinhead Christian Picciolini to stop spreading hate and work to lead others away from such ideologies. It’s how Daryl Davis, a Black man, befriends Ku Klux Klan members in hopes they will have a change of heart.

Oh, I did another quick errand at another locally owned store. My cashier was a beautiful young man with the fluffiest of Afros. We commiserated over the bankruptcy of a longstanding area business. Somehow, in the magical way conversations happen, he told me he was a “survivor” of hideous corporate policies from his last job and we agreed rapacious capitalism was destroying our country and I told him about our food co-op. As I left, he blew me a kiss.  

*These federal agents are no longer poorly paid. Thanks to the horrific tax overhaul bill recently signed, the budget for ICE enforcement is larger than Russia’s total military budget. ICE is now the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money than the budgets of the DEA, ATF, FBI, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined. Starting this week, these masked warrantless federal agents will be offered a signing bonus of 42K and a six-figure salary.