Make America Purple Again
America is at its best when we work together.
This fall, when you are making/ buying your Harris/ Walz swag, I urge you to please consider making it purple rather than blue.
Purple is a combination of red and blue. It’s what you get when red and blue work together. You know, kind of like America is supposed to do.
Since the dawn of the 21st century, it’s become more and more apparent that America has become a deeply divided nation and a house divided cannot stand. One of the things that I have come to deeply despise about election years is the giddy glee with which one side always celebrates their supreme victory over the other side. In recent years politicians have seemed to focus far more on publicly “scoring points” against the other side than advancing policy or doing the (arguably) rather boring work of governing.
As much as both sides would like to claim the moral high ground and protest that they were merely “defending themselves” against the attacks of “the other side”, those attacks should have never happened in the first place and they are coming from both sides. It takes two to tangle. Wars don’t happen when only one side is fighting.
Lyz Lenz, an author and writer I previously admired, sent out her weekly e-mail recently where she proclaims a “dingus of the week.” This is almost invariably a political figure she doesn’t agree with, and being a staunch Democrat, it is (needless to say) generally a conservative. This week it was Megyn Kelly, whom she apparently previously wrote this about.
The dogpiling on Kelly was delicious. A beautiful post-election cocktail of shut-the-fuck-uppery that we all needed. Because for too long we’ve been watching conservatives spew vile racisms, while liberals grab their pearls and say, “Don’t boo, vote.” Nah, you can boo and you can vote. And you can do both aggressively.
The idea of civility is just the window dressing of moral cowardice. If more Americans got used to calling evil evil instead of bending over backward trying to make excuses for it, instead of interviewing it in diners and saying, Welllll, the left doesn’t understand! We’d have a little bit less of it.
”The idea of civility is just the window dressing of moral cowardice.” Really? This is where we are now? Yes, sadly, it is.
Both sides have been so busy mocking, ridiculing and “dog-piling” for so long now that they have literally lost the ability to remember a time when we actually largely banded together as a nation to achieve common goals. Politics is no longer about the serious business of governing, but a winner-takes-all cage match that literally the whole world is watching.
We have young people at or nearing legal voting age who have either never even seen an actual civil debate before or were too young to recognize it when they saw it. Lyz herself is not all that young, but we seem to have forgotten that some of America’s greatest leaders and most effective civil rights activists changed the world not through mockery and ridicule but by civil disobedience.
I have a hard time calling Dr. Martin Luther King a moral coward, but I would also have a hard time calling him anything other than civil. It’s unlikely he would have so many streets and buildings named after him if he were anything other than that.
The truth is that for most of our history, our government has, in fact, been civil. It’s literally even called the civil government. Being civil in the face of ridicule, mockery - or even downright evil - is not an act of cowardice, it is one of the bravest things you can do. In fact, when people respond civilly in the face of evil, it is downright inspiring.
This weekend, Taylor Swift was scheduled to perform three more sold-out shows in Vienna. Those shows had to be cancelled due to a terrorist threat. A planned evil act of violence. How did her fans respond to this threat after losing thousands of dollars spent on travel and accommodation? Did they take to the streets in anger and riot? Nope. Thousands of them gathered peacefully and sang their hearts out in the streets. They hugged, they laughed, they cried, they danced. They traded friendship bracelets and shared them with the police.
It was a sight so inspiring, it was covered by major news outlets around the world. the concert was cancelled because authorities couldn’t be sure that there were no other acts of violence planned. Did the Swifties hide in fear? Nope, they took to the streets and sang together. That is what it means to respond civilly in the face of great evil. It is not an act of cowardice, it is an act of courage.
It’s both funny and sad to me how utterly amazed we seem to be by Tim Walz. It’s as if America feels like it has found a needle in a haystack, an extreme outlier; or won the political lottery by finding such a decent human being in politics. The truth is, he’s actually just a normal American. The worst of us has had the spotlight for so long that we have completely forgotten what it actually means to be a “normal” American.
“Normal” Americans go to church on Sunday or Temple on Saturday or pray five times a day facing Mecca not to prove to others how “superior” they are, but to develop their own internal lives. They engage in religious disciplines in hopes of becoming better. Better neighbors, better friends, better Americans.
Tim Walz is what you find when you turn off both Fox New and MSNBC. He’s who you find when you get off social media and get involved in your community. He’s the neighbor - both Democrat and Republican - that will shovel your walk, pull you out of a ditch or bring you supper when you are grieving. They are the neighbors that show up and those neighbors exist on both sides of the aisle. A fact we seem to have forgotten in all the pushing and shoving and shouting that has become the norm in the last decade.
Simply based on their name, it’s easy for Democrats to think that they are the epitome of Democracy, but it’s not true. A nation divided is not a democracy. From what I can tell, Harris and Walz are candidates that a large portion of America, both Democrat and Republican can get behind. There are millions of conservatives that do not, in fact, feel like their last and current candidate presents an accurate reflection of their values and their ideals of what it means to be an American. This might be a really good time for Democrats to stop viewing Harris as “their” candidate and instead see her as our candidate. America’s candidate.
When love wins and joy wins, America wins.
