I have just begun reading Sen. Ben Sasse' book called 'Them', which seeks to bridge the divide of hate that has come into our nation. It's a subject that fascinates me: I see middle-aged white guys driving around with giant TRUMP flags in the back of their oversized pickup trucks...I see Facebook friends who do nothing but post anti-_____ (your choice of politician) screeds and memes on their home page...I overhear people sitting around and moaning and bitching about things that have no effect on their real lives and usually doing so without any comprehension of the facts.
I'm only a chapter into the book, but Sen. Sasse seems to be going in a direction that I think is more of a symptom rather than the core of the problem: it's that technology, rather than uniting humanity, is tearing it apart. We have virtual friends rather than real friends. I think he's onto something, though it's something that has seemed obvious to me for awhile; we are 'alone together', in that you will see a group of people sitting around, all looking at their phones, even as they are 'together'.
While he's right that this is a problem, I think a greater problem revolves around how we have allowed ourselves to listen to the voices that convince us that the other side is demonic. In other words, mainstream politics in 2019. When we become convinced that the problem is all on the the side of the 'other', the 'them' in Sen. Sasse' book, that becomes the problem. And the very features of our modern 'democracy' makes this almost impossible to overcome. For instance, in our past presidential election, we have inarguably the two very worst candidates of my lifetime. Hillary Clinton was tainted by three decades of the Clinton machine, and Donald Trump was (and is) an ignorant bully who has been just as bad as many of us expected he would be. You'd think that this would have inspired a real and viable thirty party challenge...but nothing materialized. Johnson/Weld, both former governors (and the ones I voted for) gathered less than 5% of the electorate and never had a chance. Even as we knew that the two main choices were awful, almost nobody was willing to think more independently...we were stuck within a paradigm where things had to be blue or red, no matter how messed up blue or red had become.
Until we become convinced that the other side is not nearly as demonic as we have made them out to be, I don't know that there is much hope on this subject. I have respect for Sen. Sasse facing this issue, but he has willingly aligned himself with a party and an ideology that is a very real part of the problem. He is of the same clan that aligns himself with President Trump, and while occasionally he will speak against Mr. Trump's ways, he almost always votes for his policies. Would he (and those on the political left, who in two years will probably be just as bad when they have hopefully swept Trump into the dustbin of history) better off staying in and working for change from the inside (which I hope he's doing?) Or would he be better off taking a stand, to 'come out from them', to willingly renounce the world that they have created?
Here's what I want to see: a new 'Declaration of Independence'...not independence from people, not from civilized discourse, not even from conscience...but rather an independence from hatred, from bullying, from idelogical crystalization, from party over country, from tribalism over decency. Here is the new declaration for those who would wish to be our leaders.
-We the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union, recognize the we have been our own worst enemy. We have pointed fingers when our own sins were the problem. We have blamed others for our own faults when we should have seen that we, too, cause disunion and disorder.
-We renounce political tribalism. When we see our leaders and our mouthpieces speak blatant lies, we will call them out. When we see our leaders and our mouthpieces promote legislation and executive orders that are filled with self-interest, we will ask hard questions. When we see our leaders and our mouthpieces mock opponents without regard to open and honest discussions of the real issues, we will become the voice of reason.
-We will stop feeding the monster that promotes discord. We will turn off our Twitter and our Facebook accounts and spend more time talking to our neighbors. We will stop appearing on Fox News and MSNBC and CNN where we speak to only people who are looking for red meat and instead appear before our constituents to answer for our actions and our votes like the public servants that we are. We will house our Congressional offices between others who do not hold to our ideologies, and we will regularly visit them and invite them to visit us. We will stop gerrymandering districts in order to narrow democracy and instead strive to create an election process in which 90% of the races are not pre-determined in their results.
-We know that change will not take place overnight, and we know that far too many of our colleagues are too embedded and dependent upon a system that rewards evil. But we will never cease from our attempts at change, and forever seek a nation that truly lives under God, with all that means.
This will never go anywhere, of course...and they are the ramblings of a single person sitting at his kitchen table on a Saturday morning rather than the product of a community of like-minded individuals as they ought to be. But they are a start for me, though...and when I am King and Dictator over this once-great nation, I'll do my best to hold to their principles.
