We can all be forgiven if we have some trouble imagining a politics of love while fellow citizens argue passionately for “open carry”— that is, the freedom to sport guns like flashy jewels — and press for “stand your ground” laws — that is, the right to shoot anyone who appears to be threatening. Still, there is a case for introducing more love and laughter into our politics and for emphasizing friendship in building a politics for the future.

I’ve seen no statistics on ruined friendships comparable to the grim numbers available on broken marriages, but even in this time of Facebook “friend” inflation, the stats could well be similar. Some of the same pressures that end marriages probably drive friends far apart. And now I hear tales of Republican friends who stop speaking because they disagree passionately about whether or not to vote for Trump, and I know Sanders backers who have stopped talking with old friends who said they were voting for Clinton in the primaries. It makes you wish we all could lighten up.

Terry, my friend since 1944, when we met in a Portland, Ore., first-grade class, is having trouble with my position on our approaching presidential election, and we’ve had other problems over the years because he was an early casualty of our nation’s war on drugs.

I now believe Terry used illegal drugs to medicate a bi-polar disorder after lithium failed to help him. Our friendship, as well as his marriage, suffered badly after he went to jail twice in California and was nearly convicted a third time. But maybe because strains on our friendship began early in the sixth grade, after his family moved away from our neighborhood, we seemed able to work through our mutual mistrust several years ago.

Our most recent disagreement seems fundamental: Terry no longer believes voting can make a difference. Government, as he sees it, has become a tool of powerful, wealthy elites, and we can only do our best to love those close to us in our families and communities.

It’s an extreme version of politician Thomas O’Neill’s famous quip that all politics is local, and it sounds like a radical response to the writer and farmer Wendell Berry’s statement: “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” Terry focuses on living simply and loving his children and grandchildren and neighbors.

Since Terry’s family moved away in 1950, we have relied on occasional visits to shore up our friendship, as well as a year in the 1960s when we both taught at the University of Missouri. Mainly we’ve depended on old-fashioned letters that helped me see our friendship as a humble form of love.

I think we could use more love like that in our political predicament today, as threats and hints of lawlessness come out of the shadows and onto the platforms of rallies for one of our major parties. We could use too some convincing arguments for non-violence, which is built on the faith, or the hope, that refusing to strike back at people who treat you unfairly, even violently, will lead them to consider the alternatives, and the most powerful alternative to fear and loathing is love.

As I look around for ways to advocate non-violence in addressing our 2016 political reality, especially the presidential race, I’m drawn to the healing power of laughter. Not all laughter is healing, of course. It hurts to be in the midst of a laughing group if you’re the only one who doesn’t understand what’s funny or you realize the laughter is aimed at you. But laughing in company, say in a theater, can feel very good when the laughter seems to say you agree at a deep level with the people around you about something you’ve seen or heard.

Of all the many people writing about our grim political predicament these days, one who seems to me most likely to help us heal divisions and move beyond loathing to laughter is Andy Borowitz, whose “The Borowitz Report” for The New Yorker finds comic possibilities that might well amuse both Clinton and Trump supporters.

In a “report” headlined “Trump Says He Would Only Use Nuclear Weapons in a Sarcastic Way,” for example, Trump is said to tell an interviewer the difference between a sarcastic and a non-sarcastic nuclear attack. “You’d use the weapons and everything, but then you’d say, ‘Just kidding,’ ” he says. Fusing Trump’s careless talk about the use of nuclear weapons with his it-was-just-sarcasm explanation for his insistence that President Obama and Secretary Clinton are founders of ISIS, Borowitz underlines the absurdity so deftly it seems nearly gentle.

Or consider an example on the other side, “Democrats Schedule Three Straight Hours of Booing to Get It Out of System.” Borowitz imagined tense negotiations between backers of Clinton and Sanders at the Democratic National Convention. The Sanders people seek 20 hours of booing and a definition of booing that includes throwing things, and Clinton’s supporters consider three hours of prime-time booing a fair compromise. Capturing distrust of the political process expressed in both the Sanders and Trump camps, Borowitz says, “many Sanders delegates reacted angrily to the agreement, arguing that the negotiations had been rigged against them.”

It’s a long stretch from three hours of booing and a sarcastic nuclear attack to a politics of love, but maybe I can find a gentle way to help my friend laugh at the absurdity of not voting as a strategy for protecting our grandchildren in a free society.

I remember the friendship between Sens. Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, which led to important bipartisan legislation, a politics of love across party lines increasingly rare in our nation’s capital. Maybe my old pal Terry and I can hold onto our grass-roots friendship, and maybe he can find a way to participate in our nation’s struggling political process.

Bill Nichols is a resident of West Lebanon. His most recent book is Finding Fox Creek: An Oregon Pilgrimage.