|
RCBJ-Audible (Listen For Free)
 |
We’ve Been Going Down A Ten-Year Rabbit Hole. It’s Time To Come Out & Reclaim Civility
By Tina Traster
The question is not whether you were better off four years ago – it’s whether you, we – were better off a decade ago.
Sure, we can talk about the economy, immigration, abortion, gun rights, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – but can we? Can we still debate, contemplate, investigate ideas with any modicum of nuance or open mindedness?
It seems we can’t. We’re at war. We’re at an impasse. We are being used, like soldiers who have no idea who or what they’re fighting for. One day we will emerge from this battlefield bloodied and disillusioned, with hindsight to show us that this was never about “us”. In the meantime, what is this doing to our psyche, neurological system, relationships, ability to think rationally, to sleep, to make good decisions? You can’t be in fight mode perpetually without consequences.
Let’s take a step back.
We’ve always been a nation of both unity and conflicting ideas, though somehow over more than two centuries, we managed to thrive because we’ve had an unspoken pact of civility and devotion to a common idea. Fundamentally, enough Americans believe in the Constitution, and in the rule of law. And that we are a secular nation. We’re a big, messy polyglot of an experiment that has found the way to mesh and meld while wrestling for cultural uniqueness and ethnic pride and voice.
We are a nation that loves to remind itself that our freedoms have been hard-fought and hard-won: think 4th of July, note the reverence we pay to veterans of World War II. There was a time when most believed an attack on American soil would bring us together; I think 9/11 reinvigorated a shared belief in our western ideals and our strength as a nation for the vast majority, probably most.
But something changed, shifted. We began to behave like a giant reality show, when the guardrails of civility started to weaken a decade ago. Like the boiling frog, little by little we were fed doses of abhorrent behavior that eventually became normalized and shrug-worthy. The intake of daily acrimony and bitterness became as normal as the weather report. In fact, the weather report was more tempestuous than daily diatribes aimed at marginalizing and insulting people.
Slowly we divided and chose our camps and stayed in them. We believed there was one correct worldview, and an enemy camp with an opposing set of beliefs. But at the same time, every day we’d go to work with people from the opposite side, exchange goods and services, interface in civic affairs, attend family events and Thanksgiving. The threats of the “other” fill us like a poisonous IV drip, bolstering the idea that only hatred and a defensive posture can protect us. We label, ridicule, meme, scoff, categorize, dehumanize, the so-called opposition. We size up, assume we understand the complexity of a person by reducing them to a cartoon. For a decade, we’ve been divided up like the multiple colors in an M&M packet and sent to our respective dishes.
I have a friend, she leans staunchly blue. I’ve known her for 15 years. I only just discovered that she doesn’t believe in abortion rights. So which side is she on? No person is all one thing, or another.
Here’s the problem – America’s become like middle school gym class – and even worse, the playground. We’re told to pick a side by the playground bully in chief. Be on one team. Wear the uniform. Cheerlead for the victory. Knock down the enemy on the other side.
But living in America isn’t a soccer game. It’s not color war at sleepaway camp. We’ve become the worst example of how adults should truly behave.
In her book “The Power Worshippers,” Katherine Stewart writes “We have been exposed to so much extreme rhetoric – and so many apocalyptic visions for world domination – that we no longer remember the time when such ideas and those who espoused them were nowhere near the center of political power.”
Stewart nails it: We, a people who are strong and forceful and patriotic, have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by those who used to on the fringe, but now are near, or at, the center of political power. We’re being used and fooled and scared into believing that a man or a woman can rescue us from some kind of apocalyptic moment in our history.
C’mon. We’re better than this. We know this isn’t true. Sure, we have struggles but most of us get up every day in a functioning democracy and work and love our families and blindly pledge allegiance to the United States of America. Like it or not, we all belong to one another.
The real fight for us is to stop fighting. To stop feeding that beast. To stop making ourselves sick and corrupt with anger and putrid in our hearts. To refrain from pointing fingers and instead shake hands and come to the table and sort through our difference of opinion as we’ve always done. It seems the last decade has cast a spell of amnesia on us through the politization of everything. We live at a fever pitch, collectively reddened in the face, shouting, angry, exhausted, sad, divided.
How about if we stop it. What if we stop fanning the flames. What if we band together and deny politics the poison it has relied upon for the past decade. What if we dictate new terms. What if we become the center of power because isn’t that what the American people have always believed themselves to be?
