In which I return from the dead but the proverbial equine does not.
Communication is hard. It entails — though we hardly think of it as such — nothing less than the reconciliation of universes. Our lives, our memories, our thoughts and imagination are known in whole only to ourselves, are impossible to transfer to another person. It is only on the basis of the commonalities we share that we are capable of speaking to and understanding each other at all: love, fear, frustration; music and expression, dancing and fighting.
When we speak to each other, even in banalities, it is these commonalities that we continually rely upon and presume — and it is the innumerable ways in which these presumptions hold false that we find ourselves at impasses. Bad meetings, angry couples: so often when you look from afar, you immediately recognize that the conflict at hand is virtual, that the two parties are, without realizing it, talking about completely different things.
Each is in a part of their own universe unknown to the other, fighting proxy wars on common territory and in common tongue but only as references to implicit truths elsewhere. As long as neither acknowledges what is actually at hand for the other, nothing can be resolved.
Flashpoints often trigger these battles. Every major shooting elicits the same dance. One side talks about statistics, rationality, pragmatic limitations, while the other talks about personal responsibility and freedom. The spark turns to flame turns to conflagration: “is this finally the one? Surely now you’ll see the need for some regulation,” begets “that would infringe on my Constitutional rights, would violate what this country was founded upon,” leads invariably to “you’re really so small-minded that you think gun rights are worth more than human lives?”
At no point are these parties talking about the same thing. The control advocates see a practical problem and wish to solve it practically: people are dying without reason, and so we should eliminate the ability for bad actors to act at so rash a scale. The rights supporters see the issue from a spiritual perspective, a philosophical one: they see the soul of America itself. Gun rights are a uniquely American institution, relatively speaking. They set us apart from the world, say something about the trust and freedom its government invests into its citizens. To take away gun rights would be to make America less American, would be a corruption of what our country stands for. Humankind are passionate about our core beliefs, are typically willing to pay the price of lives for the providence they seek, whether political, religious, or economic.
Other battles burn slow and long. The argument over immigration has persisted in America since its birth. The names change, the faces change, but the basics are there. “These are people, too! We were given a chance and so should they.” A disbelieving sigh: “we have no chances to give, we’ve been wrung dry! How can you give more of what we have to them when there’s already too little to go around for the rest of us?”
The argument is as old as time. And again, the rhetoric leaves no room for reconciliation. One side sees a practical problem, that jobs are leaving the country and more people are in poverty than ever, yet the gates are still open for more to come in, for what little there is left to be spread yet thinner. The other side sees a violation of the American spirit, of what they’ve been taught and come to believe is a founding principle of America, is what sets us apart and above.
These are far from the only examples. From the national anthem to coal, from monuments to the environment (also monuments), the issue at hand is discussed only in the most perfunctory of terms, serve only as avatars of wider issues and beliefs. And so often, when we get the most emotional and frustrated, when we dig our heels in and scream, “enough!” — it is about our country, our people, who we are. We fight endless proxy wars over the soul of America, without ever acknowledging that this is what we are doing.
Why, then, do we seem to be more at odds than at any previous point in our history, can we not seem to agree on anything anymore? Many arguments can be justifiably made: the clustering effect of social media, the reduction of complex issues to sound bites and shorthand (ironic in the age of twenty-four hour cable news), the increasing partisanship of trusted names and institutions, and the simple ingraination of Pavlovian reactions to tired, centuries-old debates are all reasonable accusations to level.
But these all focus on the division, on the face of disagreement. They are what keep us apart, put the words in our mouths to hurl at each other. We would not be so susceptible to such cheap tricks, I suspect, if it weren’t for the one thing that binds us all together, that we are all so desperate to fix and thus all recognize is broken: America. The American dream.
The American dream is failing. We all feel it. As a product of immigrants, I can only say this metaphorically: our parents’ parents’ America is long gone. The rewards of hard work have run dry, the ability to build something out of nothing has been subsumed. We do exactly as we are told, follow all the steps as rigorously as possible, and yet somehow we still come out behind.
Millennials are an alarming extrapolatory sample: it cost something around 306 hours of minimum wage work for a baby boomer to pay for a four-year college; it costs a millennial 4,459 hours to do the same. Everywhere you look, the story is the same. Wage stagnation, home prices, medical costs, social safety nets — it is impossible to say that hard work has the same value today as it did fifty years ago.
This is probably why millennials catch so much flak: a generation or two ago, all one had to do was really roll up the sleeves and commit to a purpose and make oneself useful and a fulfilling middle class life, with all its trinkets and baubles would surely follow. If the youth can’t cut it in America, surely the problem is with them. In truth, this line of reasoning was applied—just as blithely—even in that rosy past, to people of color. It is still applied today.
So now, if you will, imagine with me: you grew up in a red state. You went to school, did all the right things. Maybe you were a bit of a ruffian here or there, but who isn’t? Your parents were, when they were young. And they’re plenty successful. But the opportunities just aren’t there for you, even dead-end jobs are hard to scare up. You’re getting by, but things simply aren’t great and middle age is staring you down. Something is wrong with the American dream. It can’t be something wrong with you; you did all the right things. So did your friends, and they’re not doing any better. This life should work, has worked, has always worked, worked for your parents. So you start looking for what’s rotten.
And everybody you know and everybody you listen to on the television from a reputable national news network points at the one unknown, the one great source of change in America, past, present, and future: immigrants, minorities. You’ve never met one, except in passing: you can’t afford to live in a city, and cityfolk aren’t terribly inclined to offer you any jobs anyhow. But everyone you know is struggling, and now there’s a drug problem sweeping through your town, and nothing has changed about what you’re doing, how life has always been here, but where is the money going and it isn’t here and where else can it be but the immigrants? The welfare queens? Nothing else adds up, and everybody seems to agree on this one thing, at least.
Is this racism? With a wide enough lens, it would be hard to argue that it isn’t. But what is this person supposed to have done not to have come to this conclusion? Reality is, after all, the sum of repeated observation and convention, and in this person’s life reality is wholly self-consistent on this topic. And every time they talk to one of the few liberals they know, they get an earful about how racist or backwards they are and how they don’t have it half as bad as so and so or so and so, so kindly shut the fuck up.
If it is racism, I would argue, it is not on the part of these folk. Trump voters voted for a racist, but intent matters and it’s not entirely unreasonable to insist that we can’t help others until we have our own house taken care of—and it’s in clear evidence that we don’t.
If it is racism, I would argue, it is on the part of the complicit powerful: the partisan media, the wealthy. Those who truly demand—and these days the only ones who receive—government handouts, free rides: titans of dying industries, middle class homeowners who covet their mortgage-interest deduction, upper-middle class investors who have twisted this nation’s yardstick of national success from living quality and individual income to stock market prices, who need simply to throw their money into investments to make all the money they need, to earn what is theirs. When I was a kid, I recall politicians promising to grow the middle class, to ensure opportunity and a comfortable existence for all. The wording has changed subtly since then, on both sides of the aisle: they only ever talk about preserving the middle class, serving the extant middle class.
It is racism, but it is not the racism that white folk seem to care so much about: impropriety of thought or speech, outright violence. These are the faces of racism to white folk, because these are the only things they observe. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the “shithole” storm. That stuff is a Tuesday afternoon. This is racism of the most prevalent, insidious form: crimes of ignorance. Of negligence. It does nobody any good to label an accidental, unconscious racist as such, because by the definition white folk understand, these people genuinely aren’t. Attacking people with horrible labels seldom opens them up to feedback, to new ideas. I’ll say this again: at some point we have to decide between the absolutism of our ideals and making progress as a people.
Because ultimately, as we fight and hate and scream at each other down in the mud, it is these people that benefit. As long as they can keep us at each other’s throats, bickering over flags and anthems and monuments, as long as they keep us divided, fighting the proxy wars of their more-fanciful beliefs, we won’t ever stand a chance at righting what is truly wrong with this country, with this economy.
Because America is dying, and we all care about that. We’re just not good at talking about it with each other, not good at remembering what we all hold in common. The house divided is falling into itself. Let’s us fix it, and remember that fixing it doesn’t mean tearing down the other half, but rather standing yet more firmly on our shared foundation.
