The 10% Problem

By LONNIE KING

I’m writing this from Michigan, where I’ve spent the holiday weekend doing the most radical thing an American can apparently do in 2026: sitting in a room with family members and just…being with them.

I’m at my in-laws’ house. And having a wonderful time.

To be sure, I believe some of the people at this gathering see the political world very differently than I do. I’m not going to tell you how, exactly, because it doesn’t matter. And honestly, the specifics are the least interesting part of the story.

What’s interesting is everything else that happened this weekend

The Other 90%

We ate the same food. We laughed at the same dumb things on TV. We complained about the same stuff: bad bosses, slow drivers, the guy at work who takes credit for other people’s ideas, the special hell of being on hold with customer service.

We rooted for the same team (at least in fútbol, if not baseball).

We recalled events from decades ago, laughed about the right way to make breakfast, which, let the record show, can be a real disagreement with real stakes.

If you added it all up, I’d guess we agree on something like 90 percent of how we actually move through a day. And, I don’t mean 90 percent in some sappy, greeting-card sense. I mean literally: the food, the shows, the jokes, the small daily aggravations of being a working person in a body that needs coffee.

That’s the bulk of a life. That’s most of what any random Tuesday is made of.

But then there’s the 10 percent. The political stuff. The stuff that, if you only paid attention to it, would make you think we were strangers.

The Traffic Doesn’t Care Who You Voted For

Self-isolating has always been a component of my existence. I grew up around a particular kind of sorting. You were Baptist, the family down the street was Methodist, and somehow that small difference got treated like a border crossing.

Nobody said it out loud, but you learned it anyway: where you belonged, and where the line was that kept other people out. My wife grew up in a similar way, although in a different part of the country, with the same invisible fence.

And here’s what I didn’t realize until much later: once you’ve practiced that kind of sorting and segregation enough, you get good at it. You’ve already built the muscle for deciding who’s in your camp and who isn’t.

Politics just gives that muscle a bigger gym.

But strip away the labels for a second. Put someone from the far left and someone from the far right in the same DMV line, on the same delayed flight, the same grocery store on a Sunday afternoon.

Both of them have sat on hold with an airline for fifty-five minutes, listening to the same looping saxophone, ready to hurl their phone across the room. Both of them have stood behind the guy who wheels a completely full cart into the express lane like the number twelve is a suggestion.

Nobody’s posting about that. Nobody’s arguing about that on the way out the door.

Religion and politics hand us plenty of reasons to stay in our separate corners. But they also drown out the quieter truth, that most of life happens down where the labels don’t reach.

How 10% Starts Feeling Like 100%

Here’s the thing about that last 10 percent: left unchecked, it has a way of acting like it owns the whole house.

One disagreement about the news can hang in a room a lot longer than the two hours we spent laughing about something stupid. If you’re not careful, you start mistaking the loudest part of the visit for the whole visit.

After this past weekend, I think that’s actually the story of the country right now. And it’s got less to do with politics than we think.

The big problem is that we’ve traded a face-to-face culture for an online one.

We used to just hang out — on porches, at diners, in living rooms, at the bowling alley. Now a huge amount of what we know about each other comes from a phone screen, and the version of a person you meet on a screen is not the whole person. It’s just the sliver of them that got angry enough, or righteous enough, or scared enough, to post something.

So we start believing that sliver is the whole pie. We see somebody’s one furious post and think: that’s what they think about, all day, every day. That must be all there is to them.

We forget the other 90 percent, because the other 90 percent doesn’t post.

What Actually Happens When You Show Up

But then you actually go sit at the table. And a funny thing happens: politics barely comes up. Not because anyone’s avoiding it out of politeness, but because it’s genuinely not what people want to talk about when they’re together.

People want to talk about their kids, their jobs, their health, their vacation plans, whether the tomatoes came in okay this year. Strip away the feeds and the noise, and it turns out almost everybody wants the same basic things: a decent job, a safe place to live, a good future for their kids, a few laughs along the way.

We did drift close to ‘politics’ a few times. Not in a heated way, just in the way real life has a habit of bumping into policy. We talked about taking care of veterans. About what it costs to fill up a tank or a grocery cart these days. About protecting Social Security and Medicare for the people who’ve spent a lifetime counting on them.

And you know what? We wanted exactly the same things. Every single one of us at that table.

The difference, if there even was one, wasn’t about what we wanted. It was about how we thought it should happen. And that’s a much smaller gap than the one the internet would have you believe exists between us.

Disagreeing about the road doesn’t mean you’re trying to reach a different destination.

I’ve been chewing on that all week.

Where Love Actually Fits In

I want to say something about love, because I think it gets left out of this conversation.

We hear a lot about how politics has split families. And it’s true — there are real fractures out there, real holidays that didn’t happen, real silences where phone calls used to be.

What we talk about less is the role love plays in all of it.

Here’s what I mean: when you find out that someone you love deeply — someone who loves you — sees the political world completely differently than you do, there’s a specific kind of hurt that comes with it.

It’s not just disagreement. It’s disorientation. You think, how can this person, who knows me and loves me, not see what I see? How can I be so wrong to them, or they so wrong to me, when everything else between us is so right?

That confusion — that quiet ache — is love. Love is part of why it stings in the first place.

But here’s the other side of that. Love is also what lets you sit at the table anyway. Not to pretend the difference doesn’t exist. Not to concede a thing. But to look past the opinion to the whole person — the one who taught you something, raised you, showed up for you, made you laugh until you couldn’t breathe.

Love doesn’t make you agree. It makes you able to see beyond the part you don’t agree on.

I’m not saying love fixes everything. It doesn’t. Some rifts go deeper than a holiday visit can reach, and I don’t want to be glib about that.

But for a lot of families sitting on the edge of a divide they didn’t ask for, love is worth naming — not as a solution, but as a reason to keep trying.

Maybe the Fix Is Simpler Than We Think

Maybe the answer isn’t a better argument, a sharper debate, or the right combination of facts that finally changes someone’s mind.

Maybe it’s just showing up at more tables.

So here’s my question, for whoever you are, wherever you land: when’s the last time you sat across from someone you disagree with? Not to debate them, just to be with them.

What would you find, if you let the other 90 percent back into the room…and let yourself love them anyway?

Maybe that’s our way back to being ‘united’.

Grace and grit to you! –LK