Spending a spring break driving from Northampton to North Carolina and back again, I listened last week to radio stations all over the spectrum, from NPR to Rush Limbaugh to religious and college radio. Most of the programming was devoted to coverage of the five state primaries from that week, and much of it reflected the severe and sad divisions in citizens’ thinking and talking about what is at stake in the coming elections and in America’s future. NPR noted the anger expressed by so many voters; Rush described anyone protesting at Trump rallies as a leftist (read: implicitly wrongheaded). And so on.
So then I returned to the Valley, perused a week’s worth of Gazettes that had arrived in my absence, and saw in these opinion pages the same divisiveness I had heard all week in other parts of the country. One writer proclaims, “I do not want to pay more taxes so my neighbors’ kids can go to college for free.” Another, a pastor who, despite the Bible’s injunction to judge-not-lest-ye-be-judged, declares that my daughter and her wife, by being married, are actually “defeat(ing) the marriage-based society and replac(ing) it with … sexual promiscuity.”
My, my. What if, instead of shouting and knee-jerking, we spent a bit more time thinking of real reasons why not every sane person in the community thinks exactly the same way we do, and how we can keep striving to resolve our numerous confusions and half-understandings, believing that a unified socially beneficial order is possible? Especially if we shout less and expand our vision of our social, economic and moral needs.
John Stifler
Florence