If there is one thing that the coronavirus pandemic cannot stifle, it is our voices.

I see that every day in the letters that come through my inbox, and the comments that dangle from my online content like icicles. If anything, it seems one more side effect of this new virus might be how loud they have made us.

As someone who enjoys arguing both sides of almost any issue, I have long mourned the slow death of reasoned disagreement. While it seems to have grown more tired and frail every year, I fear it may be yet another casualty of the pandemic — another ailing patient whose preexisting conditions put it at greater risk.

It was already hard to have a conversation with someone who voted for a different candidate, who went to a different church, who came from a different background, who thought different things. What were lines in the sand became fault lines that cracked into chasms separating us.

I hoped for bridges. When those failed, I prayed for communication.

That is becoming harder as people scream their opinions at each other so they don’t have to hear dissent. They only quiet to listen to what agrees with the positions they have already staked out and claimed with a flag.

There was a time that party was a wide swath of the political spectrum and a vote was a choice that could change with the individual positions of the candidate. This Republican might appeal more to that Democrat than the GOP candidate. A bright blue county could spend years voting for a blood red official because of more than just party.

But that seems to have passed away like dinosaurs and disco. Today people want everything from math and science to facts and photos to pick a side and fall in line.

And this is not a partisan statement. There is not one side that is guilty of this. There are ways — great and small, trivial and important — that we are all guilty.

Do we see a link to a story and discount it because we don’t like the website? Do we hear a well-researched fact and dismiss it because of who quoted it? Do we click the unfriend button because someone said something we don’t like?

This isn’t how we learn and it isn’t how to argue. Arguing is fencing with words and ideas, blocking a thrust not with a shout but with honest fact-checking and parrying with a well-reasoned response.

And as with fencing, we can learn as much from the fights we lose as the ones we win. That means we have to be open to exploring an issue and being wrong about it.

We shouldn’t squelch our voices when it comes to issues of the pandemic any more than we should with other things that matter like jobs and the environment and economic development. What we should do is learn to use them like the effective weapons that they are.

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