Where is the United States that I love?

I have given this post a tremendous amount of thought, starting after the mailing of the pipe bombs. The recent shootings at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh have only compounded my inability to get my arms around what is going on in our country and being able to write as much as a single coherent paragraph.

I was born in the United States, spending my childhood in those fabled days in the 1950s when houses weren’t locked and children played outside unsupervised until it got dark or until they were called in. We walked to school and felt safe there, although we did have those civil defense drills where we had to crounch under our desks with our hands over our heads. We still went home from school for lunch every day because most mothers did not work then. If it was too cold and I just couldn’t make it home, I would stop at another house of somebody I knew along the way, and they would give me lunch and call my mother so she would know.

This around me today is not the country that I grew up in. These are not the American people that I know and love. There always has been prejudice and hatred, of course; I grew up in the Midwest and was certainly exposed to my share of anti-Semitism. But it tended to stay hidden; there was no sense that there was a subset of our population for whom overt acts of hatred and violence, even ugly words spoken or put in print, would be socially acceptable. There were one-on-one acts, quickly caught and punished, frowned upon by the local or state or federal government, as the case might be, and decried by the newspapers. There were not words or actions that one side might even cheer for. We didn’t even used to have sides the same way. You and I might disagree on an issue, but we were both Americans and had no less respect for one another because of this.

I think the current erosion of civility started with the Internet. Back a few years ago, did you ever read one of those generic posts or ‘articles’ on the Internet? Then you scrolled down to the comments section and were shocked by all the vitriol, the hatefulness, the outright attacks on “the poster above”. I told myself that this was only possible because everybody was sitting at home writing on his or her own computer and there wasn’t a strong sense of other human beings at the other end. You were not only essentially anonymous, but you were playing a video game more than interacting with real people.

Gradually, we must have become inured to this, and at the same time, overt acts of hatred were becoming more socially acceptable as our nation became more polarized politically and this affected all other areas of discourse. Now I have heard of people, friends or else friends of friends, who were verbally accosted in public places – the Metro, a grocery store. They were doing nothing more threatening than being black or Muslim out in the open. Speaking uncivilly right to somebody’s face is new to me. It is clearly one of those things that becomes easier with practice, and easier as it’s accepted or even admired by those around the perpetrator.

So what is it like to be Jewish? Unlike blacks, Hispanics, or Muslims, we can generally “pass” in public as mainstream Americans (read as Christian and white). So when our places of gathering or worship are vandalized, our Torah scrolls are desecrated, or our worshippers are murdered, we feel threatened, vulnerable, exposed, isolated. I can’t begin to express how much it means to me personally to be surrounded by caring people – my Girl Scout troop on Facebook, the Goodwin House community, and everywhere I go. Tomorrow night, the synagogue that I belong to will be having a big gathering in memory of the Tree of Life victims. We will be joined by neighbors of many different religious faiths. Solidarity, community, the sense that there are so many people who “have your back” – this is how our neighborhoods always used to be.

A central Jewish teaching, which gives rise to a core Jewish value, is that we were all created in the image of God. That person standing across from me might have entirely different ideas, might even believe that my own ideas could lead to the downfall of our country. That person walked a path that I did not share, having experiences and getting an education that formed him or her in an entirely different way. That person is as passionate in these beliefs and sincere in expressing them as I am. THAT PERSON, LIKE ME, WAS CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF GOD. He or she is not an idiot, a worthless being, a person who should really be encouraged to leave, and certainly not somebody who is better off dead. Who am I to judge somebody whose views differ from mine? After all, these are only MY opinions, and as I gather more facts, I may find that they are wrong and have to change them.

We need meaningful dialogue in this country, not slogans. We need to understand each other’s positions, not passionate shouting and hatred toward “the other”. It is time to start the healing process of making us all once again regard ourselves as fellow Americans – that is our common and significant bond. We cannot count on our elected leaders for this kind of moral guidance, because so many of them are among the most polarized of all, afraid of being “primaried” by somebody even more extreme than they are if they dare to reach across the aisle. We the people need to realize that we are tired of this hatred, tired of brother turning against brother just because we pull a different lever in the voting booth, tired of being divided instead of realizing how very much we still have in common living in this great land. I strongly believe that most rank-and-file people are decent, have good hearts, care about their neighbors, want to make a good and safe life for their families, and have no interest in spending energy on hating somebody who is different from them. It is time for us to turn things around and restore the great country in which I was born.