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The Most Important Action All Americans Need To Take Right Now
It costs nothing except a little time and it could change everything that’s broken
We need to talk, literally. Calmly and in person, with others we don’t know. Distrust of the Other has become a virus across the country. Some, including me, will argue that this division is an intentional strategy pursued by those who want to disrupt and destroy.
At this point blame does not matter. The fears and distrust have been installed, despite rarely having had a bad conversation with those we disagree with. Humans are social.
But one word I just typed is vital to understanding this. Conversation. Not yelling, not arguing without listening, and especially not fearing out of habit.
How important is this? It might be the most important civil action any of us can take, right up there with voting.
I write almost daily about US politics, which constantly teeters on the edge of chaos, brought on by fears that are being stoked by people with questionable motives, including extreme self-interest about things like not getting thrown in jail, and money and the power it brings.
Judges take the law into their own hands, some media giants knowingly lie, pay huge fines, and continue with the lying. Wars in other countries divide us when for many they become black and white issues, rather than the complex ones underlying them.
Savvy politicians with short term goals leverage these things for a weekly five minute sound bite on a news show. The hard, sausage-making of actual governing takes too long for sound bite congress people and others, so they resort to sensational and usually unproven lies about their perceived enemies, lies that are treated as hard news by some media.
Often, behind closed doors, those ‘enemies’ are their co-workers and an entirely different conversation goes on.
As hundreds of protestors are arrested on college campuses we find out that as many as fifty per cent of them are outside agitators, some who will agitate on both sides of issues, apparently out of a sense of outrage about everything. Or maybe for entertainment.
