“If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription, who has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer – even if it’s not my grandparent. …It is that fundamental belief – I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper – that makes this country work.” – President Barack Obama

I’ve been thinking a lot these past few months about the issues that have historically divided our country.  Of course, the first image that comes to mind is the Civil War, followed by the 1960’s Civil Rights movement, and then the rage against our involvement in the Vietnam War. I’m not convinced that we are more divided today than we have been in those times, but now we have a 24-hour, sensationalized news cycle, social media, text messaging, and camera phones.

One thing I admired about President Obama was his constant reminder that we are our brother’s and sister’s keepers. That we can’t live in silos and expect to thrive as a society. That we have to come together, “not as red states or blue states, but the United States of America,” as so famously repeated during his campaign rallies. He ran on a platform of hope, unity, and “Yes, we can.”

Unfortunately today, we are most definitely red people and blue people.

In March of this year, I wrote an idealistic post about the opportunities we have to reach across party lines, understand each other, and choose the good of our country over the politics of our echo chambers.

Then COVID-19 shut down life as we knew it, people got sick, and too many started dying.

Then a black man was murdered while jogging. A black woman was shot dead in her own house in her own bed by the police entering the wrong apartment (whose family has yet to receive justice). And another unarmed black man was choked to death while a police officer calmly kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

Any fleeting chance we had to come together suddenly reached a tipping point of no return, and my own ability to patiently understand the other side grew thinner with each passing month.

What’s most interesting is that there seems to be clear political lines about what value we hold more dear – our individual liberties or the common good. Of course, there are exceptions to this on both sides, but more and more, it’s easier to guess how someone is going to vote based on their views on masks and/or BLM.

It’s hard to understand how people can reach such different conclusions when confronted with the same evidence. Then I remember that we aren’t looking at the same evidence at all.

Today, we’re living in a time when military troops are firing tear gas and rubber bullets on American citizens on American soil to protect federal statues and buildings. They’re even firing on moms and grandmas. And yet, I hear very little outrage about protecting the civil liberties of those protestors or the reasons they’re protesting.

There is misinformation and conspiracy theories* being spread about a virus that has killed three times more people in New York than 9/11, and yet I see little grieving for the 150,000+ lives lost here in the United States due to Coronavirus.**

We seem to be unconcerned by Russia’s proven interference in our last election and have a President who wants to bring in Russia to help with cyber security during the election. (I mean, seriously??!!) Not to mention, Trump’s consistent praise of Vladimir Putin, defense of his actions like annexing Crimea, and failure to believe, let alone address, the multiple intelligence reports about the bounties Russia put on American military in Afghanistan.

I hear the stories that we are on the verge of becoming a socialist or communist nation, but I don’t hear concern about an attempt to delay our election. And instead of expanding voting rights,  people are believing the falsely spread doubts about mail-in fraud though there is very little election fraud in general and only a tiny fraction of mail-in ballot fraud.***

People continue to ignore or dismiss the constant stream of racist comments and support for white nationalism by Trump, but don’t seem to worry that white supremacists have accounted for more terrorist attacks in our country than any foreign threat.

This is a pivotal moment in our history as a nation. To prove to ourselves and the world that we are who we say we are. To espouse the five ideals we tout as making us the world’s greatest country: democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity, and equality.

To do that, we have to vote this November. We have to stay vigilant about voting rights and work to expand them. We have to remind each other that we are each other’s keepers.

Because this November , we have a chance to Make America Better.

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References

*A great article on why Christians, especially, are prone to believe conspiracy theories

**A visual representation of how many deaths are being caused by Coronavirus

***A database of election fraud reports maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation reports approximately 1,200 allegations of voter fraud – for which there were 1,100 criminal convictions – for voter fraud since 2000. Of those, only 204 allegations, and 143 convictions, involved mail-in ballots. That is a tiny fraction of the roughly 250 million mail-in ballots cast over those two decades. In addition, problems are extremely rare in states that rely primarily on vote by mail.

[Photo by Josh Johnson on Unsplash]