The Highest of All Arts and the Path Away from Trump
On June 8, 1972, Shirley Chisholm shocked her supporters by visiting George Wallace in his hospital room in Silver Spring, Maryland. Chisholm was a political progressive; Wallace, then governor of Alabama, a notorious segregationist. They were rivals in the Democratic presidential primary, and Wallace had just been shot five times at point-blank range by an assassin.
“Shirley Chisholm! What are you doing here?” asked the governor, who would remain paralyzed and pain-ridden for life. Wallace knew he was her nemesis, and that her supporters would be angered by the visit. Her answer brought him to tears.
“I don’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,” she said.
They chatted and prayed together until his doctors said he needed to rest. When she left, Wallace did not want to let go of her hand. His daughter Peggy Wallace Kennedy has described Chisholm’s visit as altering her father’s life. “Shirley Chisholm had the courage to believe that even George Wallace could change,” she said. “Chisholm planted a seed of new beginnings in my father’s heart.”
This.
This is what is currently missing in our social media-saturated world.
I believe the country is at a tipping point culturally and on that razor's edge, we have choices to make. One of those choices is whether we are a fundamentally punitive bunch, hellbent on punishing each and every slight or insult or if we instead can look beyond indiscretions and assumptions and get over ourselves long enough to focus on the common good.
The example set by the evicted president is an illustration on how not to behave. His outgoing antics demonstrate a level of pettiness, a model of emotional slightness, and an inability to witness a bigger picture of the world than the one that revolves strictly around himself.
Social media, once thought to be a heralding in of increased community and connection, has become nothing less than the most massive propaganda machine ever created with the widest and deepest reach of anything previously imagined. The use of it to right perceived wrongs, to wield against others in increasingly petty methods, and to proliferate the most divisive sorts of agitprop has destroyed families, reputations, and seriously compromised our ability to govern ourselves.
Recently, a group of heady thinkers published a paper—Political Sectarianism in America—and argued that "Political Sectarianism consists of three core ingredients: othering—the tendency to view opposing partisans as essentially different or alien to oneself; aversion—the tendency to dislike and distrust opposing partisans; and moralization—the tendency to view opposing partisans as iniquitous. It is the confluence of these ingredients that makes sectarianism so corrosive in the political sphere."
Othering. Aversion. Moralization.
The three pillars of Facebook as supported by the bedrock bracings of Narcissism, Vitriol, and Memes About Dogs Dressed as Things Non-Canine.
“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”
― Christopher Hitchens
The tipping point is not for the two extremes, one side who believes that Trump was robbed of the election by a long dead Latin American dictator and that wearing a mask in public will make their dicks fall off, and the other side is filled with race and gender-obsessed demagogues raging about the phantom menace of systemic marginalization by all things white. Same lunacy, different clothes.
No, the tipping point is for those of us who heed the warning: "Beware the conspiracy theorists for they will eat all your paste and mumble to themselves in line at the Arby's."
Do we leap off the cliff of Facebook-fed insanity or learn from Shirley Chisholm and maybe our new fairly elected president Uncle Joe?
"We still have to engage in compromises, the highest of all arts. Blacks can't do things on their own, nor can whites. When you have black racists and white racists it is very difficult to build bridges between communities. People say: 'Get whitey!' Oh, it's so frightening."
The highest of all arts, indeed.
Compromise is about building something rather than destroying something. It is about looking past the obvious differences and finding the more substantial similarities. It is humanist rather than racist or sexist. It is a stretch of the perspective to encompass all of us rather than some of us. Compromise and the commitment to do so is a rebuke to othering, aversion, and moralizing.
America isn't a great country because of our values or our democratic notions or our massive wealth. It isn't a great country because we invented things and have a big-ass military, or because Hollywood is here. America is a great country because we do our best despite all of the very human flaws we possess to practice this highest of all arts. The best of us succeed in tough but fair compromises. When they do, we all benefit.
