You can't be an American and Avoid Politics
And there is a cost.
We all advocate citizenship. And then we seem to advise against it.
If you say that on the one hand you can’t be an effective citizen unless you participate in the political process, and then, on the other hand, that politics is a corrupt and nasty business and warn people to keep their distance from it, you seem to be saying: “get involved “and “stay away” at the same time.
I agree that one face of politics is brutal, cruel and selfish. A famous political scientist compared it with joining one side or another in a fight that is already going on. Who wants their children to get into fights and who wants their “golden years” disturbed by family arguments while enjoying Thanksgiving dinner. Many of our views about the “other side,” taken uncritically from the internet, are hateful. We are right to leave them unspoken, even if we think we believe them. Unfortunately, though, the golden rule of American life then becomes “don’t discuss politics with friends.”
But we should! All successful communities, large and small, evolve successful ways to settle conflict through deliberation and discussion, that is by “politics.” The sides, and there are almost always more than two, can be “heated.” “Time outs” are expected. There is a lot of posturing, performance and laughter. Actually, laughter is one of the good angels of our nature, defusing extremes and maintaining guardrails.
You can’t avoid the fact that dispute resolution is central to a peaceful society. And handled poorly, conflict will burn a society to ashes. Or be settled at the end of a gun.
A central lesson of history: when politics is ignored by the wise and thoughtful, it is seized and monopolized by the brutal and the self-serving.
There is an American way of citizenship. We can be political advocates, citizens, and not lose friendships.
Take a reasonable stand and defend it with examples, logic and evidence. Accept challenge to one’s own ideas and facts. Share new experiences and discover new ideas, traveling a common road with many different people, always listening to their judgements and respecting their opinions. Be willing to admit mistakes. And, finally, speak without fear of reprisal and engage in peaceful protest. This is doing politics the American way, it is making “good trouble.” It is the road we have taken for nearly 250 years.
I know we live at a time when it seems many of our most cherished ideas about the right way to be a good citizen are being challenged. Today strong voices claim that there is one true way to lead this country, and one right direction. They reject the wisdom of a tempered and resilient mind. They reject what we truly are: inheritors of a way of life that explores new words, is awed by the lines of a sonnet and is curious about the fossil remains of a new species.
They claim that all essential “truth” is knowable, that governing is implementing a “divine,’ God inspired or commanded, plan for society and they have the blue-print. They seek absolute power and believe it necessary to defeat all who stand in their way of gaining “benevolent” control over the lives of citizens.
These are extreme views, protected by our commitment to free speech, but they are not what Americans mean by citizenship.
For some, however, it is the easy way to be a citizen. Give the all-wise, the all-knowing and all-powerful ruler the keys to the kingdom. Accept authority, believe it is divinely inspired, fall in line, leave governing to the anointed.
Our history thankfully records that we have always, sometimes after a period of confusion, taken the “hard way.” Over and over again we have met each other on a common road, arriving from different paths. On this road we have openly listened to opinions and facts that are new and strange and foreign.
At our best, we live in what Theodore Roosevelt called “the arena.”
Few Americans have better expressed what it means to be a citizen than Roosevelt. Few asked as much of the citizen. In 1910 at the Sorbonne, in Paris, TR gave his famous speech about the life of a citizen, the person in the arena. I hope its use of the “male based” language of more than hundred years ago does not weaken the force of its message for you.
This is what he said of the citizen:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat…. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride the slight of what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are…. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder….It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.”
If this is what being a citizen means, I understand a hesitation to step into the arena. But, if I may borrow a line I spoke when I played TR in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace, I agree with Teddy —-
CHARGE!