We Don’t Need to Choose Sides- and maybe shouldn’t

The world is not a safe place. We want to believe that it is, and so go to great lengths to protect our psyches from this universal truth. We generalize- all black people are up to no good. All gun owners are redneck crazies. All police are nazis. All conservatives are racists and all liberals are communists. We feel the need to pick a side because if the world is a series of dichotomies and we pick the right side, we’ll be safe; at least that’s what we tell ourselves. The world is not a safe place, indeed. But what’s even more frightening is the unspoken truth: the world will NEVER be a safe place, and pretending it can be ironically makes it even more dangerous.

We’re at a critical point in our Nation’s history. At few times have we faced such adversity from within our own borders. The specter of divisiveness haunts our streets. It rises up with fire and bricks in our cities, with batons and guns in our police departments, with drive by shootings in our urban centers, and with racial slurs in our gated communities. The principle of “us and them” draws us in like moths to a flame, the flame promising some warmth or quarter. Yet in the end the flame consumes us - all of us. 

There is no safety in dichotomy, because dichotomy is an illusion- an attractively easy alternative to critical thinking. It’s difficult and arduous and sometimes stressful to process the myriad nuances of life- our minds resist us when we engage in this thinking, but if we are to find peace we must find common ground. Finding that common ground requires thinking beyond both literal and figurative black and white.

Perhaps we can find common ground in the idea that every person, every member of the human race, at his or her core simply wants to be safe, and that desire often manifests itself as fear. Fear fuels racism. Fear fuels hatred of law enforcement. Fear causes some police to overreact in stressful situations. Fear causes black Americans to rise up in quite understandable outrage at the killings of  Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. We fear what we do not understand, and the barriers we create in the “we and they” dichotomy prevents us from understanding others - prevents us, perhaps, from realizing that we have much in common. Most of those sketchy black kids in hoodies would gladly run to your aid if you dropped your grocery bags, and most of those gun-toting rurals would sit on your porch with those guns if someone had threatened you and your children. We just lack understanding of each other.

So today I appeal to every man, woman and child in this Great Nation- let us close our mouths. Let us open our eyes and minds. Let us unclench our fists, lay down our weapons and pause in silence for a moment. Let us all meet on the ground of fear- and share our fears with each other. Let us validate each person’s fears and assure one another that we will commit to keeping each other as safe as we can in an uncertain world. If we can do this, even one man at a time, we can begin to heal and quench the flames of “us and them.” In every chest beats a heart - in design the same heart as every other human being. Lets us connect our hearts and work toward the safety of peace.