Our Country, Ourselves: Sunday musings…11/3/2024
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” John F. Kennedy
That seems such a long, long time ago, doesn’t it? So long ago both literally and figuratively that I can’t remember the last time I saw that clip played anywhere. Imagine, in our world of ever-available, ever-present video of, well, everything, a signature piece of what we might consider Peak American seems to have vanished. I can neither remember, nor recall reading about a time in our history when the people who propose to lead us have appeared so disconnected from such large swaths of Americans. No matter how wealthy, how “well-bred” or bootstrapped, there always seemed to be a thread that connected our leaders to even those with whom they had a fundamental, philosophical disagreement.
For want of anything better why don’t we call that thread “love of country.”
Now to be sure there have been countless inexplicable travesties carried out under the “love of country” banner. Let’s just stipulate that up front. We can all agree that stuff like the Viet Nam war was more than a bit of a stretch on the “for love of country” foundation. I’m reasonably sure that you have at least a couple of other examples that leap to mind. These, however, represent a failure of leadership rather than a failure of citizenship or residency; I hope to convince you that what we are experiencing now is the same.
Those who choose to bleat end-of-times themes, and who insist on an “edge of the apocalypse” due to “unique and unprecedented” events over the last 2 or 5 or 15 years are comically victims of perhaps the oldest societal commentary I can think of: those who choose to ignore or forget history are doomed to repeat it. I’ve been listening to, and watching archival video of such tumultuous times in America’s history as the ’60’s anti-war protests, rioting associated with racial strife, also in the ’60’s, and the devastation wrought by the drought-driven climate disaster that tragically coincided with the Great Depression. Those, my friends, were some dark times.
There does appear to be one possible difference between those days and the last 20 years or so, on the national level that is. We have been in an era where broadly defined opposing groups have been progressively more aggressive in the act of “othering” their opponents. I, and other writers of more note, have defined “othering” as the act of characterizing an opposing group as so far removed from a “right” manner of acting, or so far removed from possessing or living by a “right” code or morality that its members become viewed as something other than worthy of acceptance as even a member of the species.
Think about this for a moment. Where once people living within the borders of the United States could agree on one simple belief, that each was a part of a group we might call Americans, we now have rhetoric bandied about by our “leaders” on all sides of pretty much any issue that essentially says that to disagree is to declare that one is somehow no longer possessing of anything we might recognize as equality. People with a different opinion are bad, evil, ignorant or unintelligent. This is certainly not a truly new phenomenon; one need only watch tape of Klan meetings in the early and middle of the last century to know that. What is striking is the pervasiveness of it in public discourse.
Again, I feel that this is first and foremost a failure of leadership. We hear this from those at the top of every societal pyramid.
Have you ever watched one of those video studies that begin when a subject in the study is asked to describe some aspect of their worldview for the camera. Individuals with starkly opposed views are then asked to discuss those views with one another. Holders of views on both sides of the issue are asked before meeting folks on the other side what they think of them. While not quite “othering” it is not surprising that position holders on each side hold rather dim views of folks on the other side of the divide. In some cases strikingly negative views.
You know what happens next of course, even if you’ve never watched these exercises: when brought together one-on-one the twosomes manage to find common ground. Indeed, they actually seek it very early in their conversation, even after discovering that their table mate completely disagrees with them on whatever hot button issue was chosen by those who ran the study. Some even move a bit toward a middle ground, if not toward the other side of the issue, but even those who don’t budge even a little bit quite obviously have a clear change in how they view someone who disagrees with them. It’s hard to decide if this transformation is the most striking outcome, or if it is the fact that these transformations in how issue opponents view one another occur in pretty much every encounter.
They are having a discussion with a person, not an issue. It’s impossible to “other” a person sitting across the table from you.
And so we return to “love of country”. A country can be an idea, of course, but I choose to think of a country, at least the one in which I live, as simply another way to describe a people. In this case Americans. JFK asking what you can do for your country has always sounded to me like what you can do for your countrymen. All of those folks we loosely call Americans, whether they live around the corner, down the block, or on the other side of the Continental Divide. Americans who, hot button issues notwithstanding, have more in common with a super majority of every other American than we do with, say, Italians or Australians. Most of the things most immediately important to us are closer to neighborhood issues than grand global issues. For whatever it’s worth I think this is also true in odd numbered years where most of our ads are for bad nutrition and possibly good medications (with impossibly scary side effects), rather than folks approving an ad telling us that other folks are bad, or evil, or simpletons.
Since the Civil war we’ve somehow made it through each and every period of unrest and upheaval, our nation intact, our institutions standing. We have, as a people, lived quiet lives largely undiscovered by any but our families, our friends and neighbors, and those who pass quietly by as they do the same. The “influencer economy” notwithstanding, almost none of us gets our “15 minutes of fame”. We are all closer to anonymous than any kind of familiar, let alone famous.
What can we do for our country today, next Wednesday and each day after that? We could do much worse than simply seeing each of those other mostly anonymous travelers as much more the same as we are than not. Seeing them not as “other” but as simply the friendly acquaintance we’ve not yet met, only a block away from a conversation over a cup of coffee or a cocktail about all of the things we share, despite whatever there is that we don’t. Seeing each other as a person and not an opinion.
True leaders never ask any of their followers to do something they cannot do. I always felt that JFK had faith in the people he led that they would, indeed, seek the best for not only their country but also for all Americans with whom they shared it. Heaven knows that I am not JFK, but I have the same faith in all of us, that we, too, will rise together next week, and next month, and for all of the nexts that follow. We will see each other not as a position but as a person.
“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” –George Elliot (HT to my friend Bruce K.)
For our country. For each other. For ourselves.
Come what may we will all be here next week. I’ll see you then…
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