Not much surprises me these days, and I fear I may be suffering from what some are calling “outrage fatigue”: the state of exhaustion that results from daily bombardment by too many outrageous events. I do, however, still feel a mild shock every time I think our polarized citizenry may have finally found some common ground only to discover once again that it’s just another patch of quicksand.
The Columbine High School massacre, almost twenty years ago (April 20, 1999), was the first mass school shooting to shock the nation. Images were seared into our memories of terrified teens being led from their school, a place which should have been a haven of safety where young people could prepare for their futures, knowing they were leaving behind twelve classmates and one teacher whose chances for a happy future had just ended. It seemed we as a nation had reached a crisis point at which we could no longer ignore our broken gun laws and that there could surely be no resistance to having a bipartisan discussion about how to keep our children safe. Children’s safety is, after all, a universal concern. Right?
The intervening years have proved that assumption wrong. Nothing happened after Columbine to prevent future tragedies, and so the massacres have continued with increasing frequency, each bringing the hope for uniting Americans against a common enemy, each time followed by more disappointing partisanship.
On December 14, 2012, when 20 children barely old enough to tie their shoes and zip their own pants were shot to death in their little school desks, it was assumed that surely no self-respecting person could resist supporting changes to our gun laws to ensure such an atrocity would never happen again. Six adult staff members rounded out the total, making it the deadliest mass school shooting in U. S. history. Five- and six-year-old babies’ bodies torn apart by bullets would rip the heart out of any decent person, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. Right? Finally, we would find the common ground on which we could unite. Finally, Congress would take bipartisan action to end these atrocities. Wrong again. The parents of those murdered children are still petitioning Congress, and still nothing has been done.
On June 12, 2016, the violence shifted from school to a place of entertainment. At the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida, 49 people were murdered. The victims were mostly Latino and LGBT, so I guess Congress figured they don’t count. So much for “All lives matter.”
On October 1, 2017, a crowd was enjoying a Sunday-evening concert in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire from a nearby hotel, killing 58 and injuring a whopping 851. The dead included at least one toddler. A toddler! I think we’re seeing the pattern by now: what should have caused universal outrage and calls for action elicited nothing but “thoughts and prayers.”
On February 14, 2018, when 14 students and three staff members were mowed down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, once again the pathos of distraught parents and friends weeping over the massacre of these children seemed a sure fix to our polarization. The bitter irony of this horrific event occurring on Valentine’s Day, the day we celebrate love, was not lost on hearers of the tragic news. How could anyone not agree that action must be taken quickly? Yet in spite of the surviving students’ passionate pleas and political activism, Congress has still done nothing. No thing. Instead, David Hogg and other survivors who made pleas for action were accused of being “crisis actors.” But this is not who we are as Americans, is it? We don’t make light of our fellow citizens’ pain and heart ache. Apparently now we do.
A little out of chronological order, but on a different subject, on October 7, 2016, the Washington Post uncovered and published a 2005 video now known as the Access Hollywood tape, in which Donald Trump and Billy Bush were overheard having “an extremely lewd conversation about women.” They were together in a bus on the way to film an episode of Access Hollywood. With less than a month to go before the presidential election, it was widely assumed that this would be the end of Trump’s candidacy. He would do what every decent presidential candidate has done when evidence of his moral turpitude has been made public: he would, of course, resign from the race. Donald Trump, however, was not a decent candidate and has never been a decent human being, so his response was that there was “zero chance” of his resigning. And he didn’t.
Okay, but naturally, the Republican Party would insist he withdraw and not further sully their name? Wrong. Well, then he would definitely lose all of his support and no respectable person would vote for him? Wrong again. Instead, we for the first time in our history heard news anchors and panelists use the word “pussy” on cable TV. Since then, we’ve heard them use “shithole,” again quoting our esteemed “president.” But, but no one believes presidents should behave this way or talk this way in public. Presidents don’t make fun of people, attack private citizens, or call other national and international leaders childish names. We all know presidential behavior when we see it, don’t we? Sadly, what we previously thought was bedrock universal standards has turned out to be just more quicksand.
Then there’s the Russia probe, which has been ongoing since Trump’s election–actually before the election. The entire U. S. intelligence community–consisting of 17 separate agencies–agreed that Russia acted to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. Horror of horrors! Even those who voted for this catastrophe would be outraged by the thought that a foreign adversary helped determine the results of our “free” election. And if there is even the slightest possibility that any American cooperated with that foreign adversary and happily accepted the benefit of their interference, we would all agree that no stone should be left unturned to determine the facts so that such a thing could never happen again. Those would seem to be safe assumptions, but not any longer. When Donald Trump says an investigation is a “witch hunt,” millions of people write it off as a witch hunt, without question; and the enemy becomes the special counsel in charge of ferreting out the truth, not the potential criminal occupying the West Wing of the White House. Attacks against Robert Mueller are a classic case of shooting the messenger.
As I write this article, approximately 3000 would-be immigrant children and babies (100 of whom are under the age of 5) are being held in cages and tents at our southern border, having been torn from the arms and breasts of their frantic parents, who came here to escape the violence in their home countries only to be met by more violence in the “land of freedom and opportunity.” One would think this would be that proverbial “last straw.” No one disagrees that families shouldn’t be separated, right? Everyone condemns child abuse, right? Nope, wrong again. Social media comments and memes prove we are deeply divided even on the treatment of children and our country’s role in providing sanctuary for desperate people seeking asylum.
The children of God who are being brutalized at our border are not “criminals and rapists” sneaking into our country to join gangs and murder U. S. citizens. They are human beings fleeing violence and seeking a safe refuge for their families. What kind of monsters have we become when we imprison their children and threaten to deport the parents without due process? As I’ve said before, this is not the USA’s first rodeo when it comes to human rights abuses, but have we learned nothing? How can we “civilized,” enlightened citizens still be capable of such cruelty and inhumanity to fellow children of God?
One opinion being expressed right now on social media is that folks who don’t want to lose custody of their children should stay the hell away. They know what’s going to happen, so if they come here anyway, it’s their own damn fault. This attitude comes largely from those citizens who like to insist that we are a “Christian nation.” I know enough about Christianity and the Bible to know these attitudes are found nowhere, least of all among the teachings of Jesus, who must surely be weeping over Jeff Sessions’ and others’ perversion of the scriptures by which they attempt to justify ungodliness and brutality. One social media user did point out that Pharaoh, Herod, and Pontius Pilate are biblical figures who separated families. Perhaps those guys are the new “conservative” heroes.
What is becoming clearer with each passing day is that this is no longer a country where people simply have differences of opinion, where Republicans have a party platform which is different from the Democrats’ party platform but where shared values based on our common history and heredity supersede party differences. Shared values and common ground have all but disappeared from our national discourse–if what we’re doing can even be called discourse.
I taught my college writing students, when writing persuasion, you have to look for common ground. You and your audience disagree on x, y, and z; if you agreed on everything, there would be nothing to persuade them of. So you have to look for things you do agree on: find your common ground and base your appeal on that. When we discussed using credible evidence to back up the points of the argument, I instructed them to look for evidence that’s universally accepted and respected. I always told them, for example, to avoid quoting the Bible as evidence since many people don’t accept its validity and would therefore remain unconvinced if the writer were to quote the whole book.
The problem in our current social and political climate is that there is no common ground, no universally respected source of information, because finding common ground requires an acceptance of facts; there have to be some absolutes. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often quoted as saying, “You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” That was then. We have since entered the age of “alternative facts”: if you don’t like the facts you’re presented, you can simply make up your own. Truth no longer exists, because truth is an absolute. Many today have no desire to know what is true; “research” is the process of finding information that validates their “facts.” Marco Rubio, in a June 28 tweet, said, “It’s not good that people increasingly get news & information only from sources that confirm what they want to hear. It’s terrible that there is increasingly no space for nuance or 3rd way on any issue.” I immediately stashed this gem away in my file, since it’s the first time I’ve ever agreed with Marco Rubio. I would note, however, that Senator Rubio is as guilty as anyone of the behavior he condemns.
Snopes and other widely respected fact-checking sources no longer serve as “proof” of authenticity; many on the Right scoff at Snopes as a tool of the Left. Journalists now are “the enemy of the people,” so nothing they say is valid. Old, trusted publications such as the New York Times are now labeled “failing” and “fake” because they dare tell the truth about the corruption in our government.
American citizens in opposing parties no longer have differences of opinion; what we have is a difference of values, of character, of humanity. We are fundamentally different people. Kayla Chadwick, in a June 29, 2017, article titled “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You that You Should Care about Other People,” put it this way:
“But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.
I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once infuriating and terrifying.
I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.”
Last week, CNN reported that after nearly two months in immigration detention, a 7-year-old child was reunited with her mother. The mother’s message to other mothers is, if you’re thinking of claiming asylum here, find another country. “The laws here are harsh. And people don’t have hearts.”
I can’t relate to anyone who can read those words and not be crushed in spirit by the fact that our country is now being seen as the place where people have no hearts.
I have nothing in common with people who can look at terrified children in cages, separated from the only safe people they’ve ever known–their parents–and say “Serves the parents right for coming here. Don’t want to lose your kids? Stay away.” And do what? Go back to the places where they are subjected to all manner of violence, where there is no safety? Anyone who would send those asylum seekers back where they came from rather than allowing them a place of refuge is simply cut from different cloth. We don’t just have a difference of opinion; we have a difference of basic human decency and compassion.
I have nothing in common with people who can watch videos of detained children “representing” themselves in court–children whose feet don’t touch the floor from the chair they’re sitting in; children who don’t understand what the judge is saying to them because they don’t know the language and even if they did, they’re too young to have any understanding of legal procedures. Anyone who is unmoved by those images is a fundamentally different person than I am, and we have no ground for a conversation.
I have nothing in common with people whose first response after hearing news of the latest mass shooting is “Blah blah blah Second Amendment. Leave our guns alone. Guns don’t kill people. We have to have guns in case our government goes crazy and deprives us of our rights.” Yeah. Because private citizens’ weapon stashes, no matter the size, would protect them against the resources of the U.S. Military: war planes, drones, tanks, machine guns, and whatever else they have. Anyone who defends their imagined “Second Amendment right” in the face of human carnage is someone with whom I can’t have a conversation. I and people who think this way don’t have a difference of opinion; we have a difference of character and values, values like why it’s important to learn to live in community.
I have nothing in common with people calling for an end to Robert Mueller’s investigation, people whose loyalty to a demagogue supersedes their desire to know the truth about an attack on our democracy and the certainty of continued attacks.
I have nothing in common with people who are not outraged by our government’s gross negligence in supplying aid to the American citizens in Puerto Rico who for almost a year now have lived without basic necessities and of whom thousands have died. The “I’ve got mine, screw you” attitude is not part of my worldview.
I have nothing in common with people who can listen to our “president” lie every day and either deny that he’s lying or rationalize why it’s okay or why his statements are not really lies. His total number of lies to date well exceeds 3000, and the number grows every day. I have nothing in common with those who accept and make excuses for such behavior.
I have nothing in common with those who oppose every effort to provide affordable health care for all Americans. Anyone who would allow their fellow citizens to die or be debilitated by curable conditions and who would make cost a factor in people’s treatment choices is not someone with whom I have a difference of opinion; it’s someone who has fundamentally different values than I have.
I have nothing in common with my fellow citizens who can listen to our “president” attack private citizens, call our elected leaders and the leaders of other nations childish names, and mock the brave women who have spoken up and begun the “Me too” movement and respond with uproarious laughter, applause, hoots and hollers, and chants to lock somebody up. And what’s more, I don’t want to have anything in common with them. In fact, I don’t even want to know them. The only person who should be locked up is the clown at the podium delivering his lame stand-up comedy act under the guise of a presidential address.
I am a Christian, but I have nothing in common with others who claim that name and use it to justify degradation, immorality, and cruelty. I respect the Bible, but I have nothing in common with those who use it as a weapon against their fellow human beings. I have nothing in common with those who quote scripture to suggest that a God of love supports and defends their cruel, racist agenda.
I have nothing in common with my fellow citizens who see our current situation as a normal he-won-she-lost-getthehell-over-it election outcome. Those who normalize Donald Trump and try to shut down the search for truth and the attempts to save our democracy are not our friends. Yes, they are in many cases our neighbors, our co-workers, our family members, our fellow church members, and our erstwhile close associates. But they have fundamentally different views of who we are and who we ought to be as a people.
Please don’t misunderstand. In case you think I’ve painted myself as a saint in these last few paragraphs, allow me to put your mind at ease. I am NO saint, and I am the first to acknowledge that fact. People who think like me are not saints either; we simply have different views of what is good, true, and decent than those among us who think electing a racist, xenophobic, lying, heartless demagogue as president is a good idea.
Every human being has the same core nature. We are all capable of immense good, and we are all capable of immense evil. The line that divides us is our own choice of which side of our humanity we will live on, and that choice is determined by what we accept as truth. In what has often been labeled the “post-truth era,” many have been deluded into accepting evil as good and the unthinkable as normal.
There is no more common ground, only quicksand. The only option left to those who would have us remain free and retain our democracy and defend our constitution is to resist with all our might. We cannot become weary in well doing; rest is not an option. Accepting the status quo is unthinkable. November is coming. Resist, resist, resist. And then vote.