As the nation seems to inch closer and closer to moving from what could be called a "cold civil war" to a hot one, I find myself more and more cynical about the possibility of reversing the slide toward political violence as the rule rather than the exception. I know enough about history to know that, when it becomes the rule, everyone has already lost. Sometimes, as was the case on January 6 of last year, I wonder whether it may already be too late. I don't want to be the last person to realize when we have reached that point, if I could otherwise prevent even a single life from being lost. But I also don't want to be someone who comes to the wrong conclusion early enough to tip the balance in the wrong direction. And, all too often in history, "the moment when" is something that only becomes visible in hindsight.
Which is why I find myself wondering whether the power of doing good is enough. Is it?
It's been written that leaders of non-violent protest such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King were successful primarily because their opposition rationalized their own existence as having been created by means that at least followed the forms of democratic processes. On the other hand, dictators like Hitler and Stalin would simply have steamrolled over any attempts to opposed them by non-violence. And, in the case of King, he ended up meeting a violent end despite his dedication, and that of his followers, to peaceful protests. Taken in the context of the violent history by which America was settled by whites at the expense of peoples of color, it's difficult if not impossible to have a lot of faith in democratic processes as being enough--or even reliable--to stop people who, ironically, agree with Mao Zedong that all power comes out of of the barrel of a gun.
Then again, one should hope if not pray that it will be enough; it beats the alternative, and millions of Americans have sacrificed everything to make it possible. And, unless we can find a way like Dr. Strange and Spider-Man to tap into the multiverse, we will never know how many lives were spared by Gandhi and King's leadership.
I found myself sorting through all this this recently while I was watching Lawrence O'Donnell's nightly program on MSNBC, "The Last Word." O'Donnell updated a story that had been prominently discussed by Fox News about a Washington state trooper who famously (thanks to social media) resigned from his job rather than comply with a mask-wearing mandate. Fox had prominently treated his refusal as the act of a true American hero.
Until, that is, the trooper caught the COVID-19 virus. And passed away as a consequence, leaving a family of five behind him. Unsurprisingly, Fox found it inconvenient to disrupt their party line by updating the story.
Some commentators might have updated it for no other reason than to billboard Fox's obvious hypocrisy, to say nothing of the callousness inherent in doing so. But O'Donnell didn't do that. Instead, noting the GoFundMe page set up on behalf of the trooper's family, O'Donnell pledged to make a $10,000 contribution to the page, and encouraged his viewers to make a contribution to it, to whatever extent they could, Within a matter of minutes after he did so, viewers added an additional $3,000 to the approximately $7,600 that had already been raised. Counting O'Donnell's contribution, and as of the time I am typing this, the page has raised over $56,000. You can read about this in detail here.
That's a lot of practical good will demonstrated by a viewer base that, for the most part, did not see eye-to-eye with the trooper when it comes to mask mandates. Including me. And it stands in sharp contrast to the treatment, or lack thereof, that Fox gave to the trooper's death. The money will go some distance toward helping the short-term needs of his family.
But does that do anything to move the country away from a violent cataclysm? I don't know. My fear is that it has the potential to have the opposite effect--that is, to make progressives and their political allies look "soft" and therefore ripe for downfall by a sudden, substantial surge of force.
And, quite frankly, there's nothing "soft" about a good many of us. Myself included. If it comes down to fighting physically for the same of the Constitution and the people it protects, I would not shy away from fighting, and even dying to do that. The folks on the other side of the ideological divide underestimate the prevalence of that feeling on our side at their peril. Perhaps at everyone's peril.
Look, I'm 65, overweight, have no military training, and have never picked up a loaded firearm other than a BB gun (and that was decades ago). But if it means following in the footsteps of my uncle in World War II, and many others, I have no problem dying on behalf of the greatest experiment in freedom and democracy the world has ever know. On the other hand, I can't say I'm super-eager to do it, either. I'd like to make it to my grandchildren's' bat and bar mitzvahs, at the very least. And I suspect that most people feel the same way. On both sides of the divide.
But I'd like to think that O'Donnell is on to something here. What if, apart from the Washington three-ring-circus, we could as private citizens find ways, on both a large and small scale, to generate good will in ways that, like the virus, don't discriminate by partisan identification. Offhand, I'm not sure what a large scale effort would look like. But I'm not prepared to discount the possibility that it could happen, either. Small-scale opportunities, like the GoFundMe page, abound.
Just as I think we need to be prepared to fight, but only if we have to, we need to give peaceful resolution of our differences a chance to happen. That's what the Constitution was ratified to enable in the first place. We need to stop talking about the Constitution as a club to use against each other, and understand it once again as the framework as a process for resolving our differences. And, as an essential prelude to that happening, we need to find the ability to believe in each other's value as human beings, regardless of our political differences.
Contributing to the GoFundMe page is one small way of doing that.
Which is why I've done it.
And why I hope you will, too.
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