DECEMBER 8, WEDNESDAY

GOOD PEOPLE

For a week or longer I have been concerned in these daily posts about coming home to a divided country and have been agonizing over how to deal with my fellow Americans who disagree with me. As in Greece or Germany I have been simply writing about what is going through my mind as I travel, this time traveling home again. Yesterday, I wasn‘t having much luck figuring things out so instead I shared a personal photographic response to the things in Asheville that touched me. But for some reason I need to come to terms with this tension for myself. It is part of my wandering, what America makes me think about, so today I‘ll plod along. You are welcome to leave at any point.

I write this stuff without imagining that anyone will actually read what I am writing. I am mostly writing to myself, passing the time, but for some reason it feels good to share what I am writing with someone else, to imagine an approving reader. So it is a little disconcerting to have someone actually respond to and question what I am writing. But that is what my brother Richard in Minneapolis did yesterday. He wanted to know why I kept calling people who believe in racism, white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, American exceptionalism and tribal patriotism (all red flags for progressives) good people. What is good about people who hold these beliefs? Wasn‘t I being a more than a little naive and even contributing to the support of these people?

Of course, such a MAGA person is a hypothetical person, a projection, and no one fits every part of this stereotype. I had argued that these beliefs were traditional American beliefs about American history and tradition, not all of them believed in strongly by all Americans and but all of them embedded in the identity of most Americans to one degree or another. People with these MAGA beliefs, I argued. simply felt that their beliefs and their reading of American history was our shared American identity and that these beliefs were being undermined by other misguided Americans who were beginning to rethink or insist that the rest of us rethink, what it is to be American. Maga people were just ordinary, conscientous, church going Americans. I was a threat to them and they were a threat to me.

That is what I meant by being good. They, we, think of themselves, ourselves, as being good, upright citizens. We all feel that we are good people. Probably every American, regardless of traditional beliefs, feels he is a good person. Being good may simply mean that you fit into your cultural norms and that the people in your tribe think well of you and approve of you. If other people vilify you it is because they have the wrong values, which likely makes them into not very good people, people to be resisted

.

So I guess what I meant by a good person was a person who fit into the norms of his particular tribe and thinks of himself as being a good person.

But I also think I was considering the attitude toward that person. We all think of ourselves as good people. So in saying that MAGA people are good church going people with traditional American values and a traditional understanding of American history I was simply saying this is how they see themselves and how I have to see them if I am going to be able to understand them or talk with them.

But I don‘t think that simply accepting a person as a good person is going to put me into a position to change their views or even to convince them that I am a good person, just because I am acting like a person who cares about them. But I think that if we are ever going to let go of our tribal selves for a while and simply work on some local issue that is non tribal, that accepting each other as good people is a good place to start. And that applies to both of sides. Because if I drop my defenses I may find that I agree with the other person about many things.

I‘ve often wondered how I became a liberal in the first place. I didn‘t choose it, it was chosen for me by my parents, by the places where they lived and worked, by the schools that I went to, by my life experience. All of those things formed my values. Why, if I didn‘t choose them do I believe in them so strongly? I‘ve always resisted people who tell me that my values are wrong and theirs are right, whether it is when they come to my door with a pamphlet in their hand or approach me in McDonalds with assumptions about how I must feel as an old white male, such as the guy who invited our group to his fundamentalist church where the minister preached from inside knowledge that Obama had been born in Africa or the guy who said Obama should be hung from a tree. Neither said anything to change my beliefs.

I have the feeling that change about any issue—abortion, same sex marriage, smoking marijuana, gun ownership, staying in Viet Nam or Afghanistan—happens very, very slowly and is more likely to happen when people on both sides don‘t feel as strongly any longer about the issue and have moved on to other things. Changing the law works best after we no longer feel strongly and not so well before. So even changes in law need to come after things have simmered down.

So I have no hope that I am going to change someone‘s mind by talking with them politely and listening and certainly not by arguing with them.

But until that time it is probably better to treat each other as being good, upright, intelligent fellow Americans and let change slowly happen.

But, of course, in a world that is changing rapidly in every way, pushing us together and forcing adaptation, this is very hard to do. It is rapid change that is threatening us on both sides more even than the issues that divide us. We need time for those issues to resolve themselves.

So in saying that MAGA people are good church going people with traditional American values and a traditional understanding of American history I was simply saying this is how they see themselves and how I have to see them (see you if you are a MAGA person) if I am going to be able to understand them or talk with them, or how they need to see me if they are going to talk with me.

But I don‘t think that simply accepting the person as a good person is going to put me into a position to change their views or even to convince them that I am a good person, just because I am acting like a person who cares about them. But I think that if we are ever going to let go of our tribal selves for a while and simply work on some local issue that is non tribal, that accepting each other as good people is a good place to start. And that applies to both of us. Because if I drop my defenses I may find that I agree with the other person on many things.

But even as this issue seems to be a big part of my experience of America, where I belong, when I am in India, where people have very different views from me I am about religion and politics and everything else, I am not disturbed by strongly felt differences. I rather enjoy them. So why is it that I am disturbed by Americans who speak the same language, eat the same food, worship the same god, watch the same television who have strong views that are different from mine? Sudden change doesn’t disturb me so much in India, why is sudden change so threatening here? Somehow here where I think we are all Americans, half the country having difference values from my own, even traditional American values, is a major threat. My identity as an American is threatened, the MAGA identity as an American is threatened, we really unsettle each other and I can’t seem to let go of the issue. Sorry.