Bringing Us Together: We Have to Do It Ourselves

In his Inaugural Address, Joe Biden talked about how he wanted to bring us together:

“My whole soul is in this.  Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause. …

And so today at this time in this place, let's start afresh, all of us.  Let's begin to listen to one another again, hear one another, see one another.  Show respect to one another.”

I hope he can do it.  He seems like a nice guy (I talked about this before, so I won’t repeat myself).  What I would say, though, is while I hope President Biden can help to bring us together, it’s not something he can do himself.  It’s something we have to do ourselves.

I understand the problem many people have today.  It’s hard to unite with people and respect one another when you think a lot of people on the other side, if not most of them, are batshit crazy.  How can you listen to people or respect people who believe ________?  (I’ll let you fill in your own blank.) 

But that is the problem.  If one side excludes the other side because they say or believe “W” and “X”, then the other side will exclude the first side because they believe “Y” and “Z”.  At which point the first side will feel good about themselves because they know they are right and the other side is, as I said, batshit crazy.  The other side will, of course, feel the same way about the first side.  And so on and so on.

Which isn’t going to get us where President Biden is talking about.  To get there, some of us are going to have to back off first, at least a little.  It is not going to be easy.  In Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (perhaps the greatest speech by America’s greatest president), he called for us to proceed “[w]ith malice toward none, with charity for all”.

We couldn’t do it.  I have my views as to why that was so, but I don’t want to go into them here.  The point is it’s not easy.  It’s hard to back off, to dial down the rhetoric, when you don’t you should have to.  But if somebody doesn’t go first, nobody will go at all.

Maybe one way to get there is to make politics a little less important in our lives, a little less of a religion.  Let’s not rely on politics so much to give our life meaning.  There are so many other things out there.¹  If we can look at those other things, maybe that will make it easier to back off a little on politics and polarization.

It may seem unfair to those who back off a little first.  But, if some of us will go first, maybe others will follow, and we can get away from this “hating you/hating me” world we are living in.  Which sounds really nice.
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¹ Like going to baseball games or at least watching them on TV or radio.

Comments

[BEatrice DeFranco]

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/05/ben-sasse-2024-466424

As we come together, let's agree on what is true and what is worthy of support. Forget the labels and rely on what feels moral and just. Reasonable people will find common ground.