We Belong to Each Other

Each of us has a role to play when it comes to lowering the political temperature. How do we know if we’re making things better or worse?

Dear Conservative Friend,

Tuesday night, September 10, 10:00 pm; it was late, and I was tired. To be clear, I would have tossed the remote control in disgust had I not been tired.

I rarely watch news – or what passes for news – on television these days. I can’t stomach it. My mom, however, does, which is how I found myself unwittingly subjected to MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell the other night. We were staying in a Comfort Inn on our way home from Minneapolis, where we spent a wonderful week celebrating the life of my Aunt Margaret and spending time with the rest of our big, Scandinavian family. It was a great trip, start to finish, both exciting and tiring – bookended, as it was, by two days of driving up and then back. By the time we reached Bloomington, IL, for our last night on the road, I was running on empty.

I cannot abide O’Donnell’s smug, sneering delivery on a good day. As you well know, I’ve spent the better part of two years writing letters to you and other conservative friends from the far-left end of the political spectrum where I reside, reaching across the political divide at a time when politicians and news pundits are determined to pit us against each other. It’s been a long two years.

The Laurence O’Donnells of the world – like the Brian Kilmeads – do nothing to help us find our way back to each other. In fact, they harm us by blurring the lines between straight reporting and opinion/commentary, by delivering “news” with dripping disdain and, sometimes, outright cruelty, and by openly aligning themselves with political parties. (Academic objectivity, anyone?). I condemn this sorry excuse for news in the strongest terms. We in America deserve better.

By this point, friend, we say the hard things to one another, and now I want to say this: I believe that until and unless you condemn Kilmead and Fox News as vehemently as you condemn Lawrence O’Donnell and MSNBC (for instance), things are not going to get better for us. As you and I know, pointing our fingers at each other gets us precisely nowhere. And despite our best efforts, yours and mine, the political divide is quickly morphing into something much more dangerous. We have long been divided in this country; we now find ourselves standing on a fault line.

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk is dead, struck down by an assassin on Wednesday of last week, just three months after prominent Democrat Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by an assassin in their home.

In a grim sign of the times, whenever there’s a political assassination, we rush to see which side committed the atrocity. Because both conservatives and liberals are absolutely convinced that one side is more violent than the other, I have done considerable research in this area. I won't share my findings here, but if you’re interested, you can do your own research using publicly available, methodologically documented databases. (Notes on this below.)

No matter the results of this research, there is one thing we can say for sure: This problem belongs to all of us.

We all want a safer, saner world for our children to grow up in, an end to politically motivated violence. Each of us has a role to play, and we must, now, rise to the occasion. How do we know if we’re making the situation better or worse?

We know we make the problem worse every time we assign extremist behavior to an entire party. One can always find abhorrent behavior and commentary on social media; our feeds are designed to show us the worst of us, to keep us firmly ensconced in our bubbles, and to show us whatever posts are most inflammatory. Unfortunately, conflict sells, and we’re buying. Making the problem worse, politicians and news organizations benefit from an ever-widening political divide, and so they fan the flames at every opportunity. To watch partisan news is to buy into the narrative that the “other side” is “radical,” or “violent,” or (pick your scary adjective). But the truth is that most people, conservative, liberal, and everyone in between, are just good folks who want to live their lives in relative peace. With that in mind, we know we make the situation better when we reject this inflammatory language every time we hear it, most importantly on our own side of the divide.

We know we make the problem worse if, when we engage in political discourse (which we must do in a healthy democracy), we argue to win. We know we make things better if, instead, we listen to understand.

We know we make the problem worse when we feel more grief about the death of someone who shares our politics than we feel about someone who doesn’t. We know we make things better when we do the hard and holy work of loving those who are hardest to love.

I do not believe Charlie Kirk practiced politics the right way, as I, myself, so often don’t. He exemplified what is true of many of us these days; he practiced politics primarily to have the last word, to vanquish those who believed differently than he did. He was a product of our times, an architect of our political unraveling. (He was not alone; Dean Withers is the left-leaning equivalent.) There are political and religious figures on the left and right who express their views in a way that brings harm to no one. Kirk was not one of them.

But for all our differences, for all our human frailty, his and mine, Charlie Kirk was my brother. His family’s loss is my loss, and I stand with them today, just as I stand with Tyler Robinson’s family and, yes, with Tyler Robinson himself. As a child of God, I don’t get to pick and choose whom I love. We belong to each other.

Love in a time of intense polarization and political violence is hard. We are all afraid, and fear morphs almost immediately into anger (and worse) if we’re not careful. Of course, I want to extend loving-kindness to everyone, everywhere, all at once, and of course, I fail daily. Always we begin again.

You make it easier for me, friend. Our hard work over the past few years – continuing to reach for each other, even as the divide widens for everyone around us – has paid off, because this we know: I love you. For all our differences, I stand with and never against you.

From this vantage point, there are no sides, there is no divide.

May others join us here.

Sara

Research, if you’re interested, on domestic terrorism by ideology and target type, can be found at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.