Regarding Sanity in the Polity (the final version)

Blogspot decided to publish this on Sunday when it was an unfinished opus.  

Today's post is what was meant to be.

 

Our American narrative has been in need of tending lately.  Conformity on both ends of the spectrum has brought our nation of immigrants to a condition I'll liken to carving a london broil which has been cooked on a brand-new bbq.  You don't know where the hot spots are, nor how evenly the entire slab of meat will cook, so you end up with burnt edges and a raw center.  Nothing is quite right, but you've taken a long time to get there.  You can't throw it away; it's too expensive and it's all you have for dinner.  But you're just not happy.  Not happy at all.

As John Stewart said on Saturday, when you amplify everything you hear nothing*.  I drive past signs telling me that Jesse Kelly Is Lying and that Gabrielle Giffords cut $500 billion from your Medicare and while yard signs have never been know for the subtlety of their message this year's crop seems to be more vitriolic than usual.  Is it true that Nancy Young Wright Supports Education or that she Voted for Cuts for Disabled Students?   Everyone is screaming at me and facts are in short supply.

Yes, Rep. Giffords voted to bail out Wall Street with your money but she did so when George Bush was president.  And we still have a functioning economy, something I am not so sure I would be able to write today had our banking system imploded.  There is nuance needed here.  

Jesse Kelly ends his television spots by encouraging me to keep believing in America.  But whose America does he want me to love?  His, where doors are shut in the face of newborns denied citizenship because their parents are undocumented?  Anchor Babies are no longer enough to keep families from being deported; the suggestion that a child should be held responsible for the misdeeds of her parents seems vaguely un-American to me.  Yet this is his narrative, his piece of the American story, and he served in Iraq so who am I to question his allegiance?

And that's just the point.  I'd like to believe that there can be animus without enmity*, that we can agree to disagree, that we can figure out how to position the meat on the grill so that nobody ends up with a charred end.  Or if they do, it's because they like it that way.  And one more thing - the charred end piece has to remember that undercooked center, because it is part and parcel of the whole.  We are united states here in America.  There were vast religious and cultural and ethnic differences between the colonies but somehow they managed to find common ground.  Was it perfect from any perspective?  Probably not.  But it was a start.  And the compromise was strong enough to hold these disparate American narratives together for century upon century.

It's nice to be reminded that we work together every damn day*.... and that's a good thing.

Perhaps that is a position from which we can start to build a more useful narrative.

and yet somehow the VFW, that bastion of liberalism and socialism, is supporting her.

* thanks to John Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity speech, 10/30/10