STAYED IN
Today everyone was still forced to stay inside. It was too slick to drive anywhere. The storm was over and we hadn’t lost power and everything was ok. We just couldn’t go anywhere.
Again, all I could think about was the terror in Minneapolis and what it said it about the United States and what it was to be American.
But, really, I was wondering what it was to be a human being. Because what was slowly dawning on me was that what is causing the terrible polarization in America is a question of our human nature, of our feeling of identity. For Trump and for half the country and even more than half the country, I was realizing, when human beings feel their livelihood threatened, and even more than that, their identity threatened, they push back and protect their identity, often by demonizing those who they perceive are threatening them. For a while I have realized that MAGA people
are defending what they feel are basic, traditional American values which they feel are threatened by uncaring liberal elites who look down on them and mock their values. These traditional American values in my understanding are white supremacy (white colonists subdued the savages and built a great country a country that is being destroyed by liberal values and trading practices and pandering to outsiders); religious fundamentalism (one nation, under God, with the Bible the word of God); male supremacy (protecting women who are responsible for children and family); American exceptionalism and entitlement to a higher standard of living than other people who are trying illegally so share in our prosperity and need to be kept out, and finally pride in American greatness with power to protect itself from all threats. I think those are the values that I unconsciously accepted as I was growing up which have been central to American culture and values.
But in my mind liberal values came about because the world has radically changed during my life time, primarily through technology which has completely transformed economic production and trade and through forms of transportation and communication that have shrunk the world until borders have disappeared and people from all over the world are confronting each other face to face, forced to accept each other. In the process marginalized people have insisted on being treated as equals.
In my mind this changing world is a threat to traditional American values and traditional American values are a threat to this new world order.
But deep down built into human nature, embedded in our DNA, is the same thing that makes dogs bark and attack each other when for some reason they feel threatened, we humans are the same way. Through our animal ancestry, when we are attacked or even might be attacked and feel threatened we fight back and defend ourselves. We honor those in the military who defend us from perceived enemies. As a boy during the Second World War I demonized the krauts and my uncles fought them on the battlefield. And then I met a German girl and fell in love and married her. In American history we have demonized native America demonized African slaves, demonized Mexicans and Chinese and Japanese and Italians and Irish and Catholics and Vietnamese and Russians. And we Americans are not the only ones. The worldwide colonial spread of European nations dominating the rest of the world, including here, was based on the right of white Europeans to be there and the claimed inability of the people we conquered to govern themselves. The white man’s burden, we were going to civilize them to be like us.
So it is not a surprise that now we are demonizing immigrants as being murderers and rapists and escapees from insane asylums. While that may seem extreme to many of us, in general, apparently, most citizens of the United States feel that people who are here without citizenship, which many would like and we make it almost impossible to get, are here illegally and should be deported. It seems most of us implicitly agree with this although when it is done violently we get upset. But many of these people have been here for twenty or more years and are married to an American citizen and have American children. Then we get a little queasy and don’t want to break up families or deport people we have been friends with for years and we certainly don’t want violence.
This is where I’ve finally realized that it is human nature to be threatened by people who are different than us. Humans are tribal. We trust our tribe where everyone speaks the same language, eats the same food, worships the same god, and has the same basic values. We have markers of who belongs to the tribe and who doesn’t, so we each try to conform to all the values of our tribe. But the result is that we become threatened by people who are a little bit different, who have a different skin color, or worship another god or speak another language.
So I’ve come to the conclusion that MAGA people are good, lawabiding, church going, intelligent, thoughtful people who feel that their traditional American values are being threatened. Many of them live in tight knit rural communities where everyone has the same values and they feel threatened by people with completely different values even if they rarely meet an Indian or Chinese or Mexican person. It is perfectly natural to feel threatened, it is built into human nature. But in cities where the cultural norms have broken down and nothing defines a person except where he lives and all kinds of people interact with each other, people don’t feel as threatened by people who are different. They accept differences.
People come to their feelings about people and cultures being different from each other not out of thoughtful conviction but because of where they live, their upbringing, and who their neighbors are. This particularly true of those in live in the open spaces of the west or people who live within the cultural traditions of the South and a heritage that goes back before the civil war. No one is bad, no one is wrong, no one is a nut, we are all simply different.
But my problem is that each of our identities is so strong and so much who we think we are that any attempt to get anyone to change, or even to listen to each other is almost impossible. So we end up polarized, fearing each other and demonizing each other and not listening to each other, each sure that we are right and the others wrong to the point that argument leads to violence as is happening in Minneapolis with each side blaming the other for causing violence.
My problem is that I have no solution to this tension. And if I look back at history and the succession of violence through war after war, including a great number of religious wars, it seems like the problem is human nature. Feeling threatened and responding blindly and violently seems built into human nature.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 