How to Make Everything Worse in America
Decent people of all political stripes need to abandon our talking points and see where we agree about the events in Kenosha.
Here’s how to make everything worse in America.
First, you have media misrepresent an event so badly that “both sides” of our frothing electorate have something to be very outraged about. Mind you, the real event merits plenty of outrage, but it’s not the stuff in the media, where
On one hand, you had the rabid white supremacist and his gun, crossing state lines, roaming the streets and picking off innocent protestors in his chosen hunting ground. Anyone who would defend a white supremacist is the lowest, most vile person, and nothing they have to say has any merit.
On the other hand, you had the sweet baby-faced all-American boy, defending a town with which he had deep long-standing ties. He was following the letter of the law and was found not guilty on all charges, end of discussion. Anyone portraying him as a white supremacist is the lowest, most vile person, and nothing they have to say has any merit.
Then the rest is easy — no one listens to anyone else, because who listens to vile, dishonest people? With such an approach, nothing changes, nothing gets better, but levels of anger and mutual distrust run higher so the next time something happens, you are even quicker to believe that “those people” on the other side as just as irredeemably evil and out of touch with reality as your preferred media outlets tell you they are.
This has become the level of our discourse in America: Instead of James Madison’s carefully crafted vision of a self-correcting system with good-faith discussion from people with varied political views, we’ve got the modern-day political equivalent of pro wrestling.
Every society is flawed, and how we go about making improvements is a matter on which decent people can disagree — but we can’t fall into the trap of believing that we’re the right ones and the other guys are the bad people responsible for all our problems.
That belief system, and all its attendant simplistic and dishonest bullshit, leads only to hate, chaos, civil war, and dystopia. No one wants that. Let’s agree on that.
We need to change these conversations. We need to suppose that most people who believe the crazy things on the “other side” are decent people. They may have been told things about your beliefs that are false. It’s up to you to show them that you have more nuanced views than that, and to invite them to share their own nuanced views too. Then listen and look for common ground.
Because that starting point has been lost — that other people are basically decent — we need to make more of an overt effort to show each other our basic decency and willingness to discuss issues rationally again, instead of whatever irrational shit the entertainment media want us to dwell on.
We need to avoid the quick hit of self-righteousness — we need to stop liking and sharing simplistic us-versus-them messages and memes. We need to stop rewarding the people and media outlets that promote those messages that tell us what we want to hear: that we’re good and right, and the other guys are bad and wrong.
It's our points of agreement, our shared reality, that allows us to move forward for better outcomes in the future.
No one wants the outcome where this kid shot people dead. There's a starting point on which we can all agree. This outcome, where people died, is a worse outcome than an outcome where people didn’t die. Can we all agree? Let's start there.
What else can we agree on about what happened in Kenosha and what needs to change?