United

In the wake of this year’s US mid-term elections, the pundits seem to agree that the country is more divided than ever; a New York Times headline today reads, “Unusually high voter turnout illustrates the intensity of divisions in the era of Donald Trump.”

And while it’s by no means inaccurate to point out that Americans hold strongly opposed views on any number of issues, I do think we all still have a lot in common.  Policy, positions, and politicians may divide us, but what we care most deeply about unites us.  Consider these seven values that all Americans share, regardless of demographics, political affiliations, or even favored NFL team.

1. Fairness: Everyone agrees that everyone should be treated fairly.  We disagree on what fairness looks like, hence the debates over immigration policy, social security, and so on.  But all Americans believe that people should get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
2. Liberty: Liberty is different than freedom; not everyone agrees that everyone should be free.  But we all value the right to live our lives as we set fit to live them; whether you’re a gun-totin’ pickup-drivin’ Nascar-lovin’ redneck or a chardonnay-sipping, Prius-owning, yoga-doing liberal snowflake, we all want the liberty to be who we are.
3. Winning: Americans love to win.  Unfortunately, where there are winners, there are losers and that’s where the disagreement and divisiveness comes in.  But if the winners remember that without the losers, there are no winners, then perhaps shared value is easier to come by.
4. Loved Ones: Everyone loves their loved ones; in most, if not nearly all cases, these loved ones are family, but it’s an overstatement to say that, as Americans, we uniformly share a love for family; lots of people don’t even like their families, but we all like the people we like.
5. Courage: Courage is a particularly American virtue; we all hold in great esteem those whom we identify as courageous.  Again, we disagree over what actions count as courageous, but we are brought together in our shared appreciation for courageous actions, whatever they may be.
6. Ingenuity: This is another characteristically American quality of character.  All our national heroes, whether on the right, left, or in the middle, were individuals who figured something out for themselves in order to make life better or easier for other people.  “Good old-fashioned American ingenuity” is really a thing and a thing that we all really value.
7. Security: Even the most contentious issues of the day, like gun control, for instance, are really disagreements over the shared value of security.  Above all, Americans (and probably, people everywhere) share a desire to live safely, free from fear, and secure from attack and persecution.  If only we could keep in mind that the surest way to establish and maintain security in our lives is to recognize our shared values and establish a greater sense of unity and harmony among us all, a unity and harmony that really is there if only we stop arguing long enough to see it.

Nuance

Famed 20th century journalist, H.L. Menken, wrote “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

We see the truth of the “sage of Baltimore’s” words every day these days as the Executive Branch of our national government offers yet another simple—and erroneous—fix to an incredibly complex and bedeviling challenge facing our country and the world.

Take the so-called “zero tolerance” approach to undocumented entry by non-citizens into the US…please!

Seriously, if there’s anything we ought to have “zero tolerance” for it’s the idea that there is a single one-size-fits-all-no-compromise way of dealing with immigration policy, especially one that results in the moral horror of children being separated from their parents who are simply doing what good parents have always done: taking whatever steps are necessary in their minds to provide a better life for their kids!

Instead of examining the root causes of why so many people are willing to make a treacherous journey from their home countries with the slim hope of finding safety and security in a foreign country that, ironically, was built on this very promise (but now, is rejecting that heritage out-of-hand), America’s demagogic “leader” proclaims that there is one and only one way to deal with the issue, as if simplistic stipulations alone were enough to solve problems whose causes are a result of myriad factors and forces with historical, economic, and social dimensions.

Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them;” that would be particularly apt in this case, except that it’s not obvious that any thinking whatsoever has been employed in crafting this “solution” to the problem.

Remember nuance?  Remember how authentic leaders like Jimmy Carter or Vaclav Havel or even, believe it or not, George H. W. Bush, recognized that sophisticated problems require even more sophisticated responses?

Nowadays, of course, “sophisticated” is a pejorative; oddly enough, a rather nuanced judgment in itself.

Ascetic

Humanity can be divided into two categories: people who wear hats and people who don’t.

Point being: generalizations are arbitrary and not all that illuminating; you can divvy up the world into any number of binary distinctions; the differences will allow you to sort, but the sorting won’t really tell you anything of substance.

Nevertheless, there may be something of value to take from noticing that people’s tastes and inclinations do fall, more or less, along a continuum between asceticism at one end and hedonism at the other.  There are those, in other words, who are disposed more towards self-denial and those whose preference is for self-indulgence.

This is not to suggest that one approach is superior to the other; it is, however, to acknowledge that, given a choice of dinner entrees, some percentage of the population will order the full meal, while some other faction will decline to put in a request at all.

I believe I lean towards the ascetic side; it’s not that I don’t take pleasure in pleasure; rather, it’s that, to some extent, my most pleasurable experiences are not those that produce the most pleasure.  Of course, if that’s the case, then those that don’t do, thereby revealing the contradictory nature of this state of affairs. 

Suffice it to say, I’ll happily take an unpeeled carrot and a shot of rye neat; save the ortolan and Singapore Sling for that outgoing person at the other end of the bar.

The late great Anthony Bourdain embodied the attitude and behavior of the pleasure-seeker; it’s harder to find cultural archetypes of the ascetic sensibility; maybe the Dalai Lama qualifies, but I’ll also take former supermodel, Kate Moss, whose famous quote, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” seems like it captures the paradoxical quality of asceticism’s appeal.

It also highlights the key point that asceticism is different than self-denial; ascetics don’t not do what they want to; they just don’t do what they don’t.