There is so much the small child’s brain is figuring out about the world it’s no wonder human memories don’t begin to form until our third or fourth year. And even then, they are impressionistic: a beloved face, the flash of a dog running across a lawn, the yellow wallpaper over a grandparent’s shoulder as he lifted us out of a crib. So much experience and so few ways to describe it to ourselves. One of the very first ways our brain organizes the world is to divide known things in two: night, day; up, down; yes, no; cold, hot; mother, father. This binary division is one of the first ways we know how the world is.
By the time we are ready for kindergarten, we can expand those mental and linguistic maps. We know there are more than two temperatures of things, the day is divided by clocks into hours, and we have a box of crayons which contains a dozen or more different colors. But this automatic binary thinking seems to really stick when it comes to sorting people. Small children believe the world to be clearly sorted into good and bad people, boys and girls, rich and poor, young and old, black and white. A critical problem in our country at the moment is that many adults refuse to grow beyond these mental labels. And spend enormous energies reinforcing these labels when they are shamelessly simplistic or just plain wrong.
I’ve been lamenting the way we compartmentalize one another this way as we approach the midterm election this November 6th. Nothing is as distorted and illustrative of this binary division than the current crop of negative campaign ads. While officially a multi-party political system, our politics have evolved into a binary choice: the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Dividing our political visions into two teams has created an Us vs. Them strategy that currently draws no one to middle ground.
Push, pull, left, right. Yes, our politics have been in this tug of war for generations. But the new pervasiveness of personal technology, the internet, and social media have allowed white racial anxiety to reemerge from the far shadows into a frighteningly broad cultural attitude, fanning the anonymous rage of some into flame. Just this week over a dozen mail bombs were sent to Democratic leaders, and neo-Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric spurred one gunman to slaughter 11 Jewish worshippers at prayer in Pennsylvania.
Some of us were once naïve enough to believe that the election of Barack Obama marked permanent social change in America. The 2016 campaigns demonstrate that racial fear is still at the heart of majority America. With no political experience and a self-professed history of exploiting women, with a campaign promise to build a giant wall on our southern border and reverse trade agreements with China, Trump won his party’s nomination and then the national election. His current policies attempt to upend sexual minority rights, stall climate change efforts and reverse laws that protect women’s reproductive decisions. Every one of these choices repeatedly divides us, each speech he gives shamelessly promotes himself, all the while Russian efforts to sow political unease in America by planting false political stories in social media, shared instantly by millions across Facebook, succeed. Putin must be thrilled.
Us/them, either/or binary thinking never could sustain a complex democracy. The answers to our personal and social challenges are too complex. I urge you to become part of the solution, and vigorously resist the racial bias we have all grown up with; to question political rhetoric, even from your own party of choice; and to recognize that the words we use to think, describe and talk with one another can have life and death consequences in the real world. Leadership at every level of government matters. Vote.
(First published 10/31/18 in Savage Pacer “Spiritual Reflections” column)