Once, in Kindergarten, a friend and I fought over an action figure.
I grabbed the leg. My friend grabbed the arm. We each pulled in our own direction, believing steadfastly in our sole right to the toy. We yelled and shouted at the other person to let go, hoping to bully the other side into abandoning his position.
We could have shared the toy, but that would have displayed weakness. There was only one correct outcome: the one where I got exactly what I wanted.
Until recently, this memory had been filed away in the far recesses of my brain. But a pair of December 2012 events—the school shooting in Newton, Conn., and the fiscal cliff negotiations on Capitol Hill—fused emotions and politics, and suddenly, it seemed everyone had morphed into spoiled toddlers fighting over action figures.
The only difference was, these fights mattered.
Public discourse in this country has fallen to juvenile levels: both sides pulling, unwilling to budge or consider that maybe there’s a way to consensus. We have radical conservative radio hosts saying “1776 will commence again” if the government takes away our right to stockpile military-grade weaponry. In the heat of fiscal cliff negotiations, with a deadline for a deal fast approaching, our president, in a press conference, opted to blame Republicans for all the world’s problems instead of using that time to work a deal that didn’t require months more of fiscal angst.
Elected representatives of Alabama and Louisiana—areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005—repeatedly voted against a measure to provide aid to East Coast states hit by Superstorm Sandy, seemingly because they’re mad the northeastern United States doesn’t have enough “real” Republicans. And—again during the fiscal cliff fiasco—the Republican head of the House of Representatives told the Democratic head of Senate to “go f*** yourself,” which is basically the adult version of “You’re not invited to my birthday party.”
* * *
How far we’ve fallen. This month, we celebrate the birthdays of two of the United States’ most revered leaders: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I dare say neither would approve of the manner we conduct ourselves in 21st century America.
Washington, of course, was a revolutionary. But I doubt he would find enough stock in the radio host’s argument or enough tyranny in our country to warrant a sequel of his war. And, surely, Lincoln had a more creative solutions to the frustrating political realities of Civil War-era America than to march up to Confederate president Jefferson Davis and say, “go f*** yourself.”
All I can conclude is, we are in an age that lacks grace, civility or even a minute bit of humanity. Instead, distrust and disregard reign.
This isn’t limited to elected officials or talking heads. A fringe community of conspiracy theorists think the recent rash of shootings—in a Colorado movie theater, at firefighters in Upstate New York, in schools in Connecticut and California—are government-staged events meant to sway public opinion in favor of gun control laws. A Connecticut man who comforted students from Sandy Hook Elementary School after the shooting has been receiving death threats. He went public with his story shortly after finding crying children in his driveway. The conspiracy theorists feel like his story focuses too much on children and guns—emotionally charged subjects—and too little on other details. But children and guns are pretty much what a school shooting is all about, isn’t it? And in what kind of daft culture (or subculture, even) does this man’s lackluster-to-some retelling of a horrific event mean he deserves death threats?
This isn’t just an isolated incident. On the other side of the political spectrum, activists issued death threats to a butcher in Portland after discovering she was using live rabbits for a class. In the class, students learned how to humanely kill and then butcher an animal. The course was an attempt to drive home the notion that food comes from somewhere, that there’s a cost beyond money to get what we eat. Plenty of people would disagree with the butcher’s methods. But are they so psychotic that it’s worth threatening the life of a human for taking the life of a rabbit? I think not.
Internationally, Americans’ extreme reactions to opinions different than their own has become central to the United States’ reputation. Abroad during the the Aug. 5 shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, I watched the television news reports with horror. First came the sadness that six innocent people had been shot and killed because they looked different. Second was the shock that the foreign press treated the event almost as if it was expected. The BBC reported the story with a ho-hum tone, as if to say, “There go the Americans shooting each other up again.”
Of course, disagreement is natural and healthy for a democracy. I’m not expecting complete harmony, and issues like gun control are not simple. They are complex challenges with no right answers.
But Americans have proven to have inability to relate to people different than ourselves and an unwillingness to discuss issues or opinions that may remove us from our comfort zone. It’s so much easier to look at the people on the other side with distrust, as the enemy.
American writer George Saunders penned a story GQ magazine in Nov. 2005, entitled “The New Mecca,” that details the author’s trip to Dubai. At its end, Saunders realizes the people he met in Dubai—though from different economic classes, races, countries and religions—were all alike, and all just like him. In one paragraph, he writes:
No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws—need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain—are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: That one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.
It’s a powerful realization that could serve us well. Humans are strikingly diverse, but, really, we’re all the same.
* * *
Back to my toy story, for a second.
You see, I didn’t really finish it. So, my friend and I each had a stranglehold on an opposite end of this plastic toy. As a plastic toy, it could only take so much abuse before the laws of nature won out. We pulled as opposing forces until the toy couldn’t take the tension anymore. It burst into several pieces, rendered completely useless. Now, my friend and I each held a part of the toy. Neither of us received what we wanted.
I tell this story because I fear for our country. I worry, if we continue on this path, the United States will end up just like that toy: in several pieces, broken and useless. We need to realize that scenario is in no one’s interest.
Because here’s the problem with a conceptional entity like a nation: once it’s shattered, there’s no gluing together the pieces.
Rob Anthes is the senior community editor of the Hamilton Post. Connect with him on Facebook at facebook.com/robanthes.
