DISTANCE
I didn‘t stop writing a week ago, I just got stuck with trying to figure out for myself how to deal with the polarization in the United States between MAGA conservatives and Democratic liberals. The next five days will recount my attempt to deal with the seeming unresolvable tension between MAGA people and liberals. No one else has shown me how to do this and it is unlikely that my attempt to deal with this seemingly intractable tension so I doubt if my personal solution will satisfy anyone else. Whenever my ramblings begin to irritate you or seem naive you can skip to May 22 when I’ll change the subject.
The first difficult issue for me is somehow disengaging from the intensity of polarization in order to think calmly. Because I give $10 a month to Emily‘s List to support the election of liberal women I am on all kinds of Democratic mailing lists which all have a double purpose. The first is to rile me up against MAGA Republicans and the second, once I am riled up, is to extract $10 from me. I hear from someone running against Marjory Greene and someone else running against Lauren Boebert, I hear from Charles Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and from Nancy Pelosi. I get twenty emails a day trying to first infuriate me and then to get me to pay up.
I erase every one of these emails without reading them. Emily‘s list is where I draw the line. I trust Emily, whoever she is. Erasing all the attempts to infuriate me, although I probably agree with all of them, helps me to calm down.
To begin unwinding it occurs to me that there are a number of places in the world where there is instense polarization that don’t touch me in this hot button way because none of them are personal. There is first of all the polarization of Ukrainians and Russians that has erupted into war. I would like the Ukrainians to push the Russians out of Ukraine, but I am not personally involved and can stay calm. When I was in Estonia and Latvia a few months ago, right on the border of Belarus and Russia, I could see how beautiful the cities were and imagine the destruction of similar cities in Ukraine. But I am not personally involved and can understand the tensions that led up to the war dispassionately. I visited Sri Lanka a number of times during the years when there was a civil war going on between Hindu Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese and even knew some people who were murdered in the war, but it was not my war. I looked at it from the outside. The same is true of my response to the terrible tensions between Moslem Palestinians and Jewish Israelis or the tensions between Sunnis and Shiites or Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants. I am an outsider.
But in each of these cases if you are a polarized insider you find it barely possible to listen to the other side. The other side is wrong and your are right.
And what I notice is that people who are most polarized, who are most threatened, are threatened by their neighbors, the people next door who speak the same language, eat the same food, share the same history and are often believe in minor variations of the same religion.
There are enormous difference in the world between religions, languages, nationalities, the food people eat, the sports they watch and on and on. But these distant differences don‘t seem to threaten us. It is the minor differences between people who are very similar, even dividing families, that are most intense. Our own devastating civil war was an example of this and our current almost civil war is another.
So it seems that the first step in dealing with intense polarization is to be able to step back and look at it the tension calmly, as I look at the Hindu/Moslem tensions in India, or the Sunni/Shiite tensions in the Middle East. The first step for me is to depersonalize the tension and to look at it as an outsider.
If I look from the outside I can see how much MAGA Americans and Liberal Americans have in common and how slight their differences are. That is the first step. So tomorrow I’ll try to do that.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 