For some reason a song by Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. was running through my mind this morning. Folks may recognize Henry by his other name, John Denver, and the song echoing in my thoughts was “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
The song reminded me that, while we are a country of people with origins from many nations and religions, we share universal experiences that we all love.
For every one of us within the borders of the USA, the things we find most divisive about each other are in fact exactly the things that brought us to exist in this location at this time.
It may be that something has destined us to stagger through a repeating cycle of oppression, rebellion, triumph, expansion, corruption and eventual loss, only to restart the eternal process with the feeling of oppression once again. We’ve gone through that with the earliest settlers and their interactions with the First Nations, seen it with the fight against British rule, saw it in people pushing westward to the Pacific coast, felt it deeply in the conflict between North and South, and recycled that experience repeatedly in one form or another until we arrive here where people are literally willing to hate their neighbor because of the things they think their neighbor is thinking.
Yes, we have dubious leadership at this moment. There certainly is a level of chaos that leaves us so vulnerable that our only protection seems to be that our adversaries look at us and say, “Wait — what?”
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We can find a way to move from the point where we stand at this time. We can find a path forward rather than feeling paralyzed at the edge of a cliff.
Even though I enjoy shooting guns on occasion, I’m not much into hunting, but I don’t personally know anyone who is trying to eliminate the Second Amendment. I don’t know anyone who wakes up each morning with the goal of convincing people to have abortions or forcing women to give birth to babies against their will. I’ve never personally met someone who thinks it is just fine for a foreign power to corrupt our election process as long as it helped their preferred candidate to win, or that they think someone who betrays our troops should be president. I doubt I’d have anything useful to say to someone who thinks they are better than another person because of the color of their skin or who or what they think runs the universe.
Sure, there are some folks out there who believe and act on those extremes, but most of us just want to live our lives in peace.
My son told me the other day, “Radicals ruin everything for everybody.”
He’s right.
We live in a moment when many of us make the mistake of thinking our biggest problems exist because our neighbors are out to get us, but actually the biggest problem at this moment exists because we merely think our neighbors are out to get us.
It’s time to think again.
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