I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty scared about the future of our country.
And that anxiety won’t go away even if “my guy/gal” wins the White House later this year. Because what the presidential election has revealed so far—hell, what the last 8 years of an Obama White House and a Boehner/McConnell/Tea Party Congress gridlock has revealed—is that our country is getting more and more polarized, millions of people hurling memes and statistics at each other across an ever more gaping distance.
C.S. Lewis described Hell as a place where people are getting further and further away from each other.
I don’t want my guy/gal to win next November. I want to win over people of conscience to a different way of thinking about immigration, poverty, education, health care, gun reform, taxation. I’m thinking about what Barbara Kingsolver said about how in a democracy, the majority sometimes rules hard—and routinely asks the other 49%, the Losers, to get lost. I’ve been on both sides of that equation, and at this point, I feel like 100% of us lose when we are so polarized.
