I read a post on Facebook where someone said they will be “sleeping well tonight.” He was referring to Trump’s address of a joint session of Congress. A friend who is pretty objective and has railed against both sides Democratic and Republican asked “How can you sleep well when you know a country is divided?”
This was an innocuous, innocent statement. The statement did not cast aspersions against either party. All he was trying to do is mention that there is no common ground and people can’t seem to find common ground on anything and it’s disconcerting. The following posts related to how happy they are with Trump’s management of the country and pointing fingers at the Democrats who oppose him. The Democrats jabbed back. Repeat the cycle. “And so it goes.”
The commentators disregarded his main point of trying to unify people and unify a country. There were a lot of posts that rationalized Trump’s policies. Psychologically speaking, people cannot even agree that there needs to be common ground or at least a search for it. That is fascinating to me. I’m trying to wrap my head around that.
I’m certainly not pointing fingers of blame. I’ve done my share of standing up and speaking out against the injustices I’ve seen, too. I’ve railed against the administration and its tariff wars and how it undermines our farmers. I’ve spoken out against the firing of federal employees who controlled the nuclear codes and how this administration has supported Putin, a dictator, over a Democracy fighting to survive against the power that invaded them.
You can’t get away from railing against the injustice you perceive when you’re passionate about making the world a better place. When rights are undermined, there is a place for righteous indignation and redirecting anger to address injustice and fight for change.
The central question remains. How do we find common ground and what is the thing tearing at the fabric of unity?
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently gave a speech titled, “How the elite rigged society and why it’s falling apart.” Brooks, a never Trumper, chastised the educated elite for what it has created. He said, “There are 3 things we educated elites brought you:
We destroyed the social fabric through inequality. We destroyed morality fabric through privatizing morality. We destroyed the institutional fabric through what’s happening right now.”
He’s right. We’ve never fully embraced unity in this country. The country was built on the backs of slaves, and we fought a Civil War to preserve the Union and abolish slavery. But there were noble movements to enact change and move toward a unified whole – Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s Women’s Suffrage Movement, FDR’s The New Deal, MLK’s The Civil Rights Movement, LBJ’s Great Society, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem’s ERA Movement, Chesar Chavez and The Worker’s Rights Movement etc.
Unfortunately, we’ve been chipping away at the virtues that have challenged dissension. Brooks understands this implicitly and tries to get at the psychology of understanding another person to heal the divide. His work demonstrates that the healing of society and the great divide begins by looking at a personal level and addressing a problem one person at a time.
He says, “Tell me about a time that made you the human being you are today?” Brooks said, “The reply is never about the fantastic vacation in Hawaii. They say, it’s the moments where they went through a really hard time. it’s the moments of suffering… The death of someone, the loss of someone, moving away from home.”
Brooks quotes theologian Dr. Paul Tillich: “Those moments of suffering interrupt your life and they remind you you’re not the person you thought you were. They carve through floors in the basement of your soul, and they reveal another cavity, and they carve through that basement and reveal more. In moments of suffering, you see yourself in a way you never thought before.”
We’re in a time of a roiling civil war through discourse. Hopefully it will not result in the shedding of blood, but I can’t, in my heart of hearts, state that this may not happen. It’s happened before in this country and the divisiveness has caused us to not care about others.
Brooks said, “Culture change is on a personal level; when we relate to one another with an attentive and generous gaze.”
My sense is we’re divided against ourselves. Sometimes the politics we discuss reveal deeper wounds of selfishness and an unwillingness to look deeper at the root cause of individualism and why we are unwilling to even seek common ground. We live duplicitous lives in the name of survival and get lost in the morass of hardship.
People disregard others because they are dealing with deeper pains. They don’t want to face themselves, so they distract themselves and avoid common ground for the sake of self-preservation. Others enjoy the drama of dissension because it gives them a high. They’ve received unwanted attention and this attention, no matter how negative, makes them feel alive and acknowledged. Still others are shedding unconscious deep psychological wounds and it is a cathartic experience for them. Still others are seeking validation and just want to feel heard by others.
Whatever the case may be, it seems the quest for authentic self is secondary to the mask we wear that protects us on a daily basis. The mask protects us from our past, it guards us from people penetrating our vulnerability and tapping the juices of our hurt.
Maybe challenging others to answer Brook’s fundamental question “What made you the human being you are today?” may help us engage with one another in a sincere manner and may offer an opportunity to see our humanity in a fresh inspiring way in an open field of common ground. One can only hope it’s one day considered.
spirit beat 