MAKING GOOD PEOPLE COMFORTABLE
I have argued in several posts that the people who want to Make America Great Again are good people who go to church, respect the flag, obey the law and simply want to restore traditional American values. The more I think about it the more this seems right to me. My brother keeps asking me in his once a week phone calls if I still believe that and wonders how I can still believe that MAGA people are good people.
He cites banning books, attacking teachers, supporting white supremacy, saying the last election was stolen, storming the Capitol, denying people the vote, refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated as reasons not to say that they are good people. But I‘m not wavering.
I’ll start out, not by saying what I believe, but what I am guessing MAGA people believe, trying to put my own deep seated beliefs aside and to see, as much as I can, from their perspective.
Not only are most of MAGA people good people and feel in their bones that they are good people but it seems to me from a historical perspective that they have justification for believing what they do. Their justification is that this is what they were taught in school and what they picked up from television and what their good neighbors also believe, what they feel all Americans believe, or should believe.
And now what they have been taught and what has been accepted American history and traditional values is being undermined by new, so-called Progressive, voices. And this makes them uncomfortable.
I don‘t remember being taught in school that Columbus was a bad person. If Columbus was mentioned at all it was for discovering the Americas and bringing white civilization to an empty land. In games of cowboys and Indians I played as a kid the Indians were sneaky, scalping people and a threat. Slavery was mentioned as an historical fact but the civil war was over states rights and if Black Americans have been left out of the American dream it is partly their own fault for not straightening themselves out. The defenders of the Alamo were patriotic Americans and the conquest of the Mexican territories was our manifest destiny. Saving souls through Spanish missions was similar to Christian missionaries in China and India, a civilizing force. The story of the building of a prosperous, free and powerful United States was the work of white men and their supportive wives and families. God was on our side in the beginning and still, proudly, is.
So I was taught the same things MAGA people believe or at least picked them up from somewhere. All of these things were not so much explicitly taught as implicitly believed. They were in the air. And from a MAGA perspective, I‘m guessing, if there were problems we worked them out long ago allowing women to vote and then Blacks to vote. We leaned over backwards to give everyone a chance. We changed and progressed with the times and certainly have nothing to be ashamed of now.
So of course MAGA people are uncomfortable. Suddenly accepted American values are being threatened and not only are they being threatened but they are being threatened by a coalition of disgruntled, narrow interest groups of people, often outsiders who have somehow got citizenship and are now, banded together, even though they don‘t often agree with each other, threatening to become a majority, if they aren‘t already, who are already undermining American values and are determined to overturn everything and to make a persecuted minority out of the good Americans who settled this land and made it the great country that it is, the greatest country on earth. Of course this makes MAGA people uncomfortable.
It is hard for me to take the MAGA side because I believe the opposite of what they believe. My experience of growing up in India and feeling at home in Germany and never feeling as if I fit completely in the United States is different from theirs. But in trying to put myself in their shoes rather than my own, this is how I imagine that they feel.
But it isn‘t just their abstract ideas about American traditional values learned in school that is being threatened, it is their very identity as Americans that is being threatened. And when you threaten people‘s basic identity you are being extremely threatening. When people are threatened, like any animal, they fight back. MAGA people are good, but now very uncomfortable and threatened people, people who feel entirely justified in fighting back in any way they can.
So what do we do as Americans, only half of whom feel this MAGA way, and the other half feel threatened by these same very traditional American values. We are all good people who speak the same language, mostly worship the same God, eat the same food, share the same economic system and also share basic values such as individualism and a love of freedom. Often we are members of the same family. How do we make each other feel unthreatened and comfortable?
One way that is not working so well is to ban anything being taught in the schools that makes us feel uncomfortable. But the problem is that to make one side comfortable you have to make the other side very uncomfortable. Trying to make ourselves comfortable will in the end make all of us very uncomfortable.
Another way is to make sure that those who threaten us can‘t outvote us, either by denying people who oppose us the vote or by adding states like Puerto Rico and the District of Colombia who will, we hope, vote our way.
But the problem is that we are 50/50. On both sides we feel that if we can make it 51/49 we will win and that will resolve things. But we know that that won‘t work, we will still be essentially 50/50 and the tension will just ratchet up on both sides and we will become more and more polarized with no way out except some kind of explosion. So democracy, majority rules, elections, won‘t resolve our tension.
It seems to me that we only have two options. One of them is to agree that we are all good people who share most basic values but because of being younger or older, urban or rural, western or eastern, looking backward to traditional American values or forward to a new world with changed values, Whitish or Black, male or female we have developed some opposing values. If we agree that we are all good people then one way out of our quandary is to accept each other as having justified values that form our identity and listen to each other as I was trying in a halting way at the beginning of this post to do. Progressives have to listen MAGA people to be able to understand why they feel as they do and the other way around, MAGA people have to listen to progressives to understand why they feel as they do. This can probably work best within families where we really do love each other and really do share most values and where the tensions are most painful. We can‘t avoid the discussion, we have to have it. And then, we will do what families have to do just by their very nature, we will have to feel our way to some sort of compromise or at least some acceptance of our differences. Secondly it is probably easier to do this at a local level within communities where we already know how to compromise and get along with each other. The hardest place to do this is probably at the state or national level with each side being egged on by social media. So the first step, for me, is to accept each other as good people and to listen thoughtfully, just as I started this post out.
But maybe the second step is to look within, to see that what we believe, if we act on it, can hurt and threaten other people. The extreme example of this is Jains pilgrims in India who sweep the ground in front of them to prevent destroying any life, knowing that every action can threaten other life. We all know that the energy we burn causes global warming, that all the trash we throw away degrades where it is dumped, that keeping desperate people from coming into our country for refuge hurts those people, that living in a huge house is an affront to those with no housing, that insisting on entitlement is going to hurt someone somewhere. We all know this and we all block it out because we feel helpless to change it and because changing it would make us less comfortable. We all, left and right, want to be comfortable. But maybe being dislocated, being uncomfortable, about ourselves is a good thing. Instead of making people comfortable, maybe schools should make people uncomfortable and questioning. Maybe a second step besides listening to those who have opposite beliefs is to examine ourselves and to see to what extent our assumption that we are good people doing the right thing may contribute to the polarization we are living within. And this may be especially true for us as
Americans, all of us as Americans, left and right, with our pride in being American and our assumption that we are entitled and our assumptions that our influence in the world is a good thing for the world. Being good people on either side may actually be causing harm to others. Maybe the first place we should look to resolve these tensions is not with our families or our community but within ourselves.
All right, this is just one attempt to deal with this by one ordinary person who is as much entitled and self centered and a cause of pain as anyone else. Worse than that, if I am right, if I am aware of the problem, then I have more reason than others to do the right thing, and I most often don‘t. So I am not resolving the the issue, I am just, in my own desperation, trying to find a way out.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 