I was sitting in my living room with a mug of coffee and a novel. As I reached the end of a thrilling chapter, I heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, I saw my old college friend Anne. This was a surprise; we had kept in touch but had not seen each other in some time. I started to greet her, but she interrupted me with a brief, impassioned pronouncement on a controversial issue of the day, then turned to leave.
Puzzled, I started to close the door, but against my better judgment, I briefly responded to her statement — respectfully, but with some disagreement. I then went back to my chair, not realizing that in pausing to respond, I had left the door open.
A few minutes later, Bill, a college friend of Anne’s who I hardly knew, burst through my door, shouting an angry rebuttal of Anne’s original remarks. He also gave me a thumbs-up before departing.
I was so taken aback by this that I hardly noticed a stranger in a red hat push past me into my living room, where he began to shout at me, calling me a “libtard” and a traitor. I demanded that he leave. He called me a “snowflake”. Two arms appeared in the doorway, each ending with a hand giving him a thumbs-up.
This fellow, Carl, continued his raving, and so he did not notice another stranger, Dave, enter and start lecturing him. Dave corrected Carl’s grammar and throwing printouts of newspaper articles at him. Three new arms appeared, offering three more thumbs-up. Carl bellowed, “Fake news!” and took a swing at Dave.
As Carl and Dave began physically pummeling each other, Bill rushed back in, screamed at Dave, and ran back out. Anne came back to yell at him, but he had already left. So she yelled at me. I shrugged. A woman named Elaine, who I did not know, peeked in and laughed out loud. A guy named Frank entered, put on a three-second repeating video loop of a 1980s child star making a goofy face, and also left.
Carl stopped beating up Dave long enough to shout at Anne, who had also left. A newcomer named Gail came in and began reading from a long screed filled with confusing arguments and conspiratorial ramblings. Dave told her that none of what she was reading was true. She said it must be, because she had read it and a lot more like it. He pulled out his own long screed and started to read it aloud. I asked him to stop. He told me that would be problematic and that I was trying to shut down discussion.
Henry entered. “Can’t we try to respectfully discuss this, and understand that this is complex?” he asked. All of my uninvited guests solemnly nodded before returning to their brawling.
Eventually everyone had gotten tired or wandered off — I heard some of them engaged in shouting matches next door and in the street. I settled back into my chair. Night came on, and I dozed off. Then the door burst open again. A new stranger, Isabel, shouting about something Dave had said hours before. I told her to go bother Anne, who had started this whole thing.
“Who’s Anne?” she asked.
Lysander Ploughjogger is a media analyst, freelance writer, and parent residing in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @LysPloughjogger.