On July 4th: a plea for Americans to tamp-down partisan hatred.
Even a little olive branch goes a long way. You may need to extend one sooner than you expect.
The Fourth of July has always been one of my favorite holidays of the year. I'm always touched by seeing families sitting out on beach chairs together taking-in the fireworks among other families. It's a holiday you can do on the cheap — people from different walks congregate for something as simple as just watching beautiful shapes in the sky, and you can convince yourself that class divisions don't exist.
If there's one message I have for other people in the States as we barely hold things together enough to celebrate our 246th year as a country, it's this:
Make friends with people who feel very differently about things than you do — your life may literally depend on it, and a lot sooner than you think.
That may be the exact opposite of what everything in your system is telling to do, but we can't afford not to do it.
Even with people who hold views that you find abhorrent — people who in return may see you as less than human — you should insist on seeing them as a person, not as an idea or as an object for all of your resentments.
Before the internet drove us into our own corners and drove us crazy, we used to coexist. We had ways of navigating seemingly irreconcilable disputes. It was messy, to be sure, and if we’re being honest, it wasn’t ever even adequate. Like 300-plus million members of a dysfunctional family, nothing ever got resolved and we simply lived with the dysfunction.
But it was, in its own way, stable.
I don’t typically indulge in gloom and doom, and I tend to have a lot of confidence in what human beings are capable of in a crisis. That said, it's not hyperbolic or alarmist to observe that the level of hatred in the air is as high as it's ever been in the history of the United States. Don’t take my word for it — listen to the experts in the fields of social psychology and politics who understand all too well just how precarious our situation is.
Economic collapse, food and fuel shortages, extreme weather, the paralysis of our systems and the degradation of our institutions… these are not things that get any easier when you pour bitter, highly flammable hatred on top of them.
Yes, some of the things that divide you from other people are legit dealbreaker-type discrepancies, but many of them are being aggravated — recklessly and even intentionally — by forces all around us. At least some of these seemingly intractable divisions can be managed. Because the extent of the disagreements (on issues like abortion and guns) are being amplified somewhat. We are literally being pulled apart. But we have the ability to stop pulling.
Here’s a really insightful podcast on isolation and the lack of friendship endemic to American life:
Before I discovered that podcast, I was thinking we should all start going for coffee or beers with people, sitting on their porches, talking to our neighbors, playing cards or sports with one another and making an effort to step over our aversions. I would urge us all to remember that people whose ideas you hate are still PEOPLE — many of them are still in your family and circle of friends.
You can make the argument that America was structurally built to implode from its paradoxes at some point or another. We appear to have reached that point. The question now isn't so much how we save the country, but how we preserve our own humanity once things begin to spiral. Forget about mere civility — we may soon find ourselves staring in the maw of that awful existential moment of truth where we find out: do we become the monsters who commit the kinds of atrocities against one another that have horrified us when we've heard about them taking place in other parts of the world?
If you think those things can't happen here, you are gravely and woefully mistaken. We are maybe just a few fractions of a degree from reaching a boiling point.
So I beg of you: find the humanity in one another before it's too late.
God bless America? More like God help America. Either way, we're gonna need it.
<3 SRK