Can We Talk? Sunday musings…9/14/2025
1. Summer. Since the dawn of empty-nesterhood I have maintained that without school-aged children in the household, summer is over whenever we decide it’s over. We took our little antique runabout “Jet Ski” out of the water yesterday.
Summer is over.
2. Why do you “put your 2 cents worth” in, but it’s only “a penny for your thoughts”? Where’s that extra penny going?
3. Plinth. A heavy base supporting a statue or vase.
No way I guess that.
4. Cellphone. The only question I have is why did it take so long for public schools to ban cellphones during the school day? It’s patently ridiculous to allow children to have anything that might distract them from the two tasks at hand: acquire the education that has been made available to you, and learn how to live peacefully side-by-side with people who do not live with you under the same roof. It’s ludicrous to expect that children who cannot be counted on to tie their shoes will demonstrate the discipline necessary to ignore this singular temptation of the present era.
Heck, when I was in grade school chewing gum in class was considered inconsistent with the ability to acquire familiarity with the 3 R’s. Somehow a cellphone is ok?
What is astonishing is that the only meaningful (if you can call something so ridiculous meaningful) push-back has come from parents who are concerned that they cannot contact, or be contacted by their children. When they are in school. In the classroom. Sorry, but this is patently ridiculous. Actually, not sorry at all. I simply cannot envision something so earth-shakingly important that I as a parent would need to text or call my school-aged child. Got a true emergency? Call the principal’s office. They still have a landline for Heaven’s sake.
Cellphones have no business in school. One could make the same case for literally any internet-connected device from kindergarten through grad school.
5. Discourse. How has it come to this? How could we as a country, as a people possibly have arrived at a place where people can respond to an assassination of an American citizen on American soil with anything other than horror and sorrow? Where once every such event was followed by universal calls for calm, for peace, for prayers for the deceased and their families, what are we to make of elected officials in our nation’s capital screaming at each other over whether they will offer condolences and prayers? How is it possible that we have people who openly rejoice that someone was shot and killed in public? Who share video of the killing as if they were there to witness it?
How has it come to this?
We have been here as citizens of a country at least twice before. A true Constitutional crisis in the 1860’s led to The Civil War. The 1960’s were a time of War, a time when a generational schism over an unpopular war in which thousands of Americans died, an unpopular draft sent thousands of young Americans into that War, was tinder for the embers of the flames that were lit during that Civil War. The battles over The Civil Rights Act and the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation set large blocks of Americans against one another.
And yet the assassination of the Martin Luther King, Jr., the leading figure in the Civil Rights movement, did not lead to the kind of malevolent declarations from both public and private figures we witnessed either this past week, or when a legislator from Minnesota was killed. No, with the exception of small radical groups that spoke for a splinter of American citizenry, back then what we heard was universal shock, universal horror across all of the population. Leaders at all levels counseled calm. Pleaded for it. Robert F. Kennedy (v 1.0) gave a speech in which he fairly begged for peace, for the kind of respectful and measured public and private discourse that Dr. King was rightly famous for.
Those most deeply wounded by the assassination declined to take up arms. With only small exceptions, declined the urge to seek, or even speak of revenge. That RFK himself should perish at the hands of a madman was almost too painful to comprehend, and yet here, too, the nation responded not with revenge but with profound sadness. To be sure not everyone loved either MLK or JFK, and yet what we heard and saw after their horrific deaths was sorrow.
Where in the world has that instinct disappeared to and why?
None of this makes any sense to me. None of this “if you’re not 100% with us we are 100% against you” makes any sense to me. I do not pledge any type of fealty to any “100% or 0” group but rather live in the great center along with what I’m willing to bet is an overwhelming super-majority of Americans. It matters not whether I am center/left or center/right, like so many I seem to be able to find less radical aspects of both camps that make sense to me.
Even at times when I have a deep visceral dislike for an individual for whatever reason–I found, and continue to find former President Clinton to be a man without a moral compass, and yet some of his domestic positions seem almost Moses-like now–I am a man of ideas and I decide where I stand by parsing ideas. Because of this there are 100%ers who would say I lack the standing to comment on anything, let alone how to address what is today being called political violence.
I respectfully disagree. I am an example of someone with the perfect standing to respond.
To do so we must first discuss what it is that is so very different in the 2020’s compared with the 1860’s and 1960’s: today it is altogether possible, nay easy to become cloistered among others who skew 100%. We hold in our hands the key that unlocks a chamber that is no less secured from other voices than any medieval monastery, convent, or coven: the connected device. Where once you simply couldn’t avoid contact with what the elders of my wife’s youth would call “them others”, now all it takes is a cellphone and earbuds. What might begin as a bit of a leaning turns into an algorithm-driven echo chamber. One begins to see smaller and smaller deviations from that 100% fealty as the flag of otherhood.
Until “other” becomes “enemy”.
This is nothing new coming from me. I have said time and time again that those things that we share, the ideas that we have in common, overwhelmingly dwarf those that we do not. We do not need anyone’s help to find out where to start: start by talking about the things we agree on. We can start by agreeing that shooting people with whom we disagree is wrong. It’s just bad. This is really low-hanging fruit. It’s sad that it even needs to be said. When someone is actually killed over the stuff that is getting folks on both sides of our political spectrum shot, we can start by agreeing that the proper thing for everyone to say, especially our political and cultural leaders, is that such a death is wrong. It is a bad thing. It is something that we should be profoundly sad about, and we should say just that.
Out loud and often.
Doing this is something that literally all of us can do. Left, right, somewhere in the middle, wherever Libertarians would say they “live”, all of us can and should do this. Governor Cook of Utah got it right. Secretary Buttigieg got it right (Sorry, none of the prominent Libertarians weighed in on the Sunday talking heads shows). The other stuff is really hard and requires an equal effort from the spineless (most of our elected officials) and soulless (the cretins who deliberately set loose the algorithms that seduce and capture) to take actions that do not solely result in their own good fortune. While I continue to assert my standing I admit to the probability that I lack the knowledge and the expertise in things on a national or societal level to reverse the drive to dive inward, and to replace it with outward.
I confess that I do not know how to lead the movement to take interactions that happen over an electronic connection that is disconnected from geography and time and replace them with those that happen in person. At arms length. It’s just really hard to see nothing but “other” or enemy in someone who is sharing their ideas and their feelings while sitting across a table, staring over a couple of beers or a cup of coffee. It’s so much easier to remember how much we share with each other, how much more we have in common than not, when we get off our computers and our tablets, turn off our phones, and talk to one another.
Or maybe I do. Maybe all it takes is to talk to one another until arms length turns naturally and inevitably into an embrace.
I’ll see you next week…
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