Even as a fiction writer, I have to admit I wasn’t much of a poetry fan. If you’d asked me to describe my thoughts on poetry I might have used adjectives like sappy, esoteric, self-absorbed and even boring. I don’t think I owned a poetry book other than the dusty textbooks from college I’d been lugging around like bad debt.

Then I met some great people who happened to be poets, and I started going to poetry readings to support them.

Coming home from just such a reading the other night, I kept thinking about how much I enjoyed it–me who’d always kept poetry at arms length–and I had this epiphany. Everyone should go to poetry readings. The world would be a better place. And I’ll tell you why.

Poetry makes you see things in a way that other writing doesn’t. And when a poet reads their work out loud this is doubly true. You get an understanding of how the poet went about creating the poem, the background that led to the finished work. And make no mistake, poetry is an intimate expression of a single soul. Sort of like Humans of the World. It’s a glimpse at another human being’s experience.

One of the reader’s that night, Erik Campbell (his new collection, The Corpse Pose comes out next month), read some pieces about his passion for heavy metal music in his youth. I’ve never been much of a heavy metal fan (all that screeching guitar, big hair and strutting), but in listening to Erik’s words I appreciated for the first time that people can find sublime joy, humor and community in sharing anything, even heavy metal.

Marilyn Coffey stepped up to the microphone next, looking every bit like someone’s fragile grandmother. I was worried no one would be able to hear her above the ambient noise. But I was wrong. She read poems about sex in a loud vibrant voice, a mischievous grin on her face the whole time. Not at all what most people expected from someone in their 70s. It made me think that, too often, we make a judgment about what people can or can not enjoy in their old age.

So, my mind was opened. Nothing earth shattering, but I thought about at least two things in a slightly different way. Imagine if everyone did that on a regular basis. Opened their minds to another’s experience. The world could certainly use more of that.

I was driving the other day and drove past a car with a bumper sticker that said what would Jesus do. A little farther down the road, I saw a car with those stick figures pasted on the rear window that showed a mother, father, two kids and a dog, all with stick smiles. Then the political bumper stickers, Trump for President (far too many), the yellow and pink ribbons, the affiliations with military branches, colleges, sports teams, the baby-on-boards . Each little bit of adhesive and paper a way for drivers to share with a world, that has no idea who is driving the car and doesn’t care, who they are.

And it struck me. Social media isn’t new.

Yes, with Facebook and other social media, you can use more words, illustrate with video and high res pictures. You can change your message more often. But is social media really so much different than those stickers that still find their way onto our vehicles? Isn’t the judgment you feel as you idle behind a car plastered with opinions you don’t share the same as a post or a tweet you can’t stomach?

There must be something innate in humans that compel us tell the world who we are or, more accurately, who we think they are.

Case in point. I pulled up behind a beat up old junker with a bumper sticker that said Honk if you like to fuck. I had to admit, I was curious what kind of person would put that on his or her car. So I passed the car, taking a good look at the driver. Grungy fortyish guy going to seed with a soiled baseball cap, jowly cheeks and a few scraggles of hair he called a mustache. And I wondered what he would do if someone ever did honk. But I didn’t test it out. Kind of creepy and, frankly, I didn’t care enough to find out. So like the sad man in that car I stayed anonymous. Sound familiar?

Nothing new about social media. People put something about themselves into the world and others make judgments about it. Bumper stickers may be an early link in social media’s evolutionary chain, but I suspect not the only one. Humans just can’t help themselves.