This will not be a liberal rant about Trumpism. In fact, I view the nativist movement as historically cyclical, just as global warming deniers view climate change the same way. Much to the chagrin of Thucydides, history continues to repeat itself, despite history teachers and philosophers doing their darndest to get people to listen to us.
People on both sides of these very different issues firmly believe they are correct. This is a big problem in a democracy. We knew some of our rights before we got to kindergarten, because our parents told us so. We all cherish our First Amendment right to freedom of speech. After that it gets tricky. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy is a terrible form of government… but it’s the best we’ve tried.
The inspiration for my writing today was an NPR interview I heard with the American diplomat to Kazakhstan discussing the current political upheaval in their country. Basically, the American interviewer was asking, in a perceivably pointed tone, questions about how citizens in a democratic society could storm the capitol and attempt to overthrow the government. Each question had a snarky tone. And this coming from a person who loves NPR! In all of the questions, you could have easily inserted USA in each spot where they said “Kazakhstan” and it was none other than what occurred in this country’s capital on January 6, 2021.
On most of the amendments we agree. Seriously, almost all of them. Few people would argue that the 19th Amendment recognizing a woman’s right to vote is unconstitutional or that the 13th Amendment ending slavery should not be. Of course, in a democracy, and a country as large as our own, there are still a small minority who disagree (gotta take the good with the bad).
A problem we are facing today is that people seem to think we all “used to agree” on everything and now we don’t.
False. This is not the case. We have always disagreed. The difference is that today information is in our face 24/7.
Things seem so much more urgent. More important. More life or death.
There are at least three amendments that we just cannot seem to agree enough to disagree about. These are the first, the second, and the 14th. We come out of the womb screaming, knowing we have the right to express ourselves. (But what if someone offends me?) We all support the right to defend ourselves with “arms” (but is a semi-automatic weapon really necessary?). All people are equal under the law regardless of race, creed, religion… but what if you’re a person who identifies LBGT or Q? Soooooo….. How to make it fair?
We all pride ourselves on loving our country. There is no right way to do that. We need to remember we are all Americans. There have always been liberal and conservative Americans. Please take it from me: Read the Federalist Papers. Or… read about them (from a historical, credible source.) Or go see Hamilton, or read the book that inspired the Broadway phenomenon. We must learn to not only agree to disagree, but to once again welcome genuine debate. Lose the “with us or against us” mentality, recognizing that we are all “us.”
D.D. Guttenplan once said, “The way a society treats its dissenting intellectuals is an index of freedom.” To demonize those who question the status quo is to risk learning and growing. Even those who got swept up in the events of January 6, 2021 were questioning what they believed to be true. Herein lies the challenge of the First Amendment. We need the media to shine a light on all happenings in a democratic society. On the other hand, it is an easy propaganda tool. We cannot limit speech. We can only educate consumers of modern media to understand its power, dig deeper, and remember that we are all in this together.
