Fighting Over What Really Matters: Politics!

THERE WAS A TIME when a good protestant simply did not marry a good catholic. We self segregated according to faith and ethnic heritage. The Irish lived in their part of town, the Italians in theirs. And anyone old enough to attend grade school understands that racial segregation was once upon a time far greater than now. Each generation is becoming increasingly color blind, ethnic blind, religion blind. Nowadays, protestants and Catholics and Jews and atheists intermarry all the time, and nobody notices. Interracial marriages are so common that they no longer turn heads, much less violate outdated state laws, which have all been repealed. The emerging millennials are largely oblivious to such distinctions. The biggest barrier preventing or destroying marriage is not even socio-economic status, great barrier that it once was. Today's barrier of choice is, almost unbelievably, political party affiliation. Put another way, we are a nation of liberals and conservatives, thoroughly, seemingly unbridgeably polarized, a house divided against itself along political ideological lines. In contemporary America, feel free to bring home an African-American, Latino-American, or pantheist to meet the parents, but don't, by any means, dare introduce the folks to the liberal democrat you are newly enamored with. Not in this Christian militia conservative household. In a strange way, that may be a good thing. It may means that politics, our sense of where we belong in civic secular society within the body politic, has more meaning than it recently has. Forty years ago the joke was: what do you consider the more pressing problem in America, ignorance, or apathy? The answer was: I don't know, and I don't care. Perhaps we are finally beginning to know and care. Forty years ago there didn't seem to be a dime's worth of difference between the two major political parties, and liberals and conservatives could engage in political discussions without fear of initiating a vase throwing brawl. Now, political campaigns end friendships break up marriages, and divide families, no matter what the skin color or church affiliation of the vase throwers. A white liberal is far more likely to associate amiably with a black liberal than a white conservative. Maybe that's a positive sign, a sign of societal evolution proceeding apace. Humans, said Goethe, are sundered by opinion, and united by sentiment. If we are going to fight, let us at least fight over that which is important, relevant, and changeable. Why bother to sunder ourselves over skin color when after all we all have one? Why worry about our differences of religion in a universe in which all worship leads to the same god, and we recognize the reality of infinite pathways to the divine? Fighting over tangible, changeable, issues of immediate concern somehow seems to offer more hope of positive productivity, with tangible results. We have always fought over money. At least let's stop fighting over everything else.