More than Agreeing to Disagree
Have faith in each other and oneself!
Our sense of the ridiculous is getting a lot of exercise. My Republican friends are every bit as appalled as I am by some of the antics of a small group of Representatives in the House and the increasingly unhinged noise from people exploiting social media channels.
This is partially blinding us to the genuine, and certainly less entertaining, threats to the overall wellbeing of our country.
What has become a tasteless sideshow cannot be allowed to take center stage. There are critical problems to analyze and bold new ways of thinking about our future to discuss.
I do not associate the publicity seeking shabbiness of the Washington or Florida sideshows with the views of my friends and neighbors in Northern Ohio who remain Republicans. They may still have some doubts about the election and are skeptical about some of the initiatives of the Biden administration, but they are not my enemies, and they are assuredly not “deranged.”
They may, to my way of thinking, lean too much on, and learn to little from, Fox News, but locally they have both feet on the ground and are strong supporters of democracy and progressive local government.
As I have said before, distrust in the conduct of an election is not disbelief in the importance of elections. In fact, it may be the opposite.
Incomplete and socially motivated information has from the beginning of the Republic been a source of passionate disagreement. Whether it is Lincoln’s “better angels” at work, or direct personal experience, we have over and over again reworked misleading arrangements of “facts,” and established more coherent views of reality.
I am a fallibilist. Not a doctrinaire relativist, but someone who sees one’s own best judgements as fallible.
We see through a “glass darkly” and interpret a common landscape in different ways. You are not my enemy. Nor are you necessarily echoing my thoughts. But we can walk this path together. There is serious work to do.