One Small Thing to Heal Our Divisions
What would it take to become a people of shared civic rituals?
Welcome, subscribers and newcomers! Enchanted in America usually posts on Mondays. Today’s post is a bonus for Election Day in the U.S., relevant to any readers whose countries struggle with political divisiveness.
On Saturday I invaded a civic ritual where possibly I did not belong. The occasion was an early Veterans Day parade in my city. I am not a veteran, nor do we have any veterans in my family closer than my grandfather, who died in Pearl Harbor before the bombs fell in 1941.1 As a literature professor in a state where Trump signs will be sprouting up next spring with the daffodils, I know where I stand in my region’s culture wars.
I covered myself in a grey coat and chose an uncontested spot of curb.
This was not an annual event I was used to attending, but before dawn I had dropped my son off with a group of adults and teens volunteering to provide perimeter security.
Thinking I might see him at his work, I came out in the drizzly grey morning as an American citizen and decided to stay for the parade.
In the presence of car exhaust and the spitting noise of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, I thought about the “willing suspension of disbelief” that allowed people to be moved by ancient Greek theater even though they could see the stage apparatus.
A parade is a kind of theater. There is no getting around the expense of fuel to run floats and VIP cars, or the homely wet shoes of the most spirited marchers.
Despite this, it was not hard to adopt an attitude of solemnity and reverence in the presence of black POW-MIA flags and dogs trained to help veterans cope with their memories.
In a book called American Enchantment, the scholar Michelle Sizemore argued that after the American Revolution, there was no civic body of “the people.” In order for the citizens of the United States to imagine themselves as one “body politic,” one “people,” they needed not only to come together in civic rituals but also to allow themselves to be moved — enchanted — by rituals such as Maypole dances and venerations of George Washington.
To put politics and theater together, you could say the early European-Americans had to suspend their disbelief that they were a people in order for them to experience the collective catharsis that constituted them as one social body.
As Sizemore points out, these early civic rituals were only fleeting enchantments. They had to be restaged again and again. They were always imperfect.
Since the women’s rights, abolitionist, AIM, and Civil Rights movements drew attention to the limits of liberty and sovereignty practiced in America, it has grown even harder to stage rituals where anyone can tell the story of a common enchantment.
Even worse, zealots keep the rest of us in a high-alert state incompatible with enchantment.
I’m not the only one noticing the absence of common rituals in my rumble-tumble country.
this morning at asked if American history isn’t rather like “a grasping search for consensus — an ever-capsizing ship attempting to balance on some even axis.”In 2017, a Pew Research Center study confirmed what most of us know from experience: political liberals and conservatives congregate around different leisure activities and lifestyles. To cite just one difference noted in the Pew survey, conservatives prefer larger houses, more spread out. And no political group except “Solid Liberals” expresses a strong preference for smaller houses, closer together, with walkable schools and stores.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur hints at my favorite solution to political fragmentation. He proposed that old myths could survive the process of critique and still have meaning under the influence of a “second faith” or “second naïveté.”
In my case, this means that even though political conservatives in the U.S. are two or three times more likely to be military veterans than political liberals (Pew study), a liberal can come to a Veterans Day parade with all her education and critical training and also be moved by the sacrifices and ideals on display. She can choose to believe in old values like courage and loyalty even with all she knows about history and human error.
So, instead of quietly accepting the new segregation dictated by political extremists in public spaces, what if center-oriented people politely, respectfully moved into each other’s social spaces and rituals, not with the old intention of conquest, but with a new intention of collective enchantment?
Like I’m doing, here in November, at this parade.
Could liberal arts majors shake hands with strangers in a Cabela’s superstore and hand out cards that read, “Hi. I’m a liberal arts major and I wish you a good hunt this year”? On a Sunday afternoon, could the Pew study’s “Country first conservatives” take colorful flyers to the public library pronouncing, “Hi. I’m a churchgoing conservative and I support public services like libraries for everyone. Happy reading”?
Not everyone wants to do it. Not all spaces are safe. No one should be forced.
But for those who can?
Near the head of the procession, the governor waved from a black car. Behind him, the mayors from three counties rolled past in labelled vehicles.
I leaned toward the nearest middle-aged mother like myself and remarked, “Only one woman among all those mayors.” My tone was not strident. I might have said, “Did you notice they’ve added blue now to the streetlights?”
She looked startled. Her nod was very small. Our mayor, the only woman, had controversially passed a major new zoning bill envisioning a future for our city with smaller houses, closer together, and walkable schools and stores. Social media seethed with outrage about it.
I understood why the woman next to me was not willing to converse with me about the benefits of women in leadership. I went back to universal pleasantries about having daughters.
Over our heads, two firefighters stood like high-wire acrobats in wide-brimmed hats and overcoats, pulling down the heavy flag that marked the start of the parade route. The rain was settling in to a steady fall. I worried for the courageous pair standing dizzyingly high in their buckets.
A marching band went by, surprisingly good, from a junior high school. I clapped with their tempo.
On a long flatbed truck, people sat and waved from hay bales. I didn’t catch who they were.
One mother beside me coached her daughter in saying “No, thank you” to the next candy purveyor.
The next candy purveyor threw fistfuls toward us from mid-street. A child on the other side of me bent down to gather all of it.
I checked on the firefighters. The one on the receiving end of the flag was still stuffing it into a sack, working vigorously. It was not a safe place to be, up there, hauling and pushing the heavy, wet cloth. Tears came unbidden as I wished the job done and the high-wire artists safe.
A second group of motorcyclists passed with POW-MIA flags.
I am no fan of motorcycles, but more tears came. I let them run with the steady rain into the grass that soaked my shoes.
I didn’t mean to spend the morning mixing promiscuously with political “others.” I meant to get a picture of my son, let him know I was proud of him, and go home.
But it was okay out there, when the radio vans rolled past, every one of them playing a patriotic country-western tune sung by a man who somewhere has a photograph in a cowboy hat.
I imagined some future parade with more people like me, where the radio vans would alternate country hits with a setting of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy movement and some spoken-word jazz from Joy Harjo and her band.
Like I say, I was an interloper at this parade, but I felt its ritual magic, and no one shooed me off.
No one spit on the mayor whose answer to our growing pains is smaller houses, closer together.
No harm came to the firefighters, who made it safely down the ladders with the flag.
And out at the periphery, teenagers directed people around the parade route, guarding the civic space where for an hour the liberals and conservatives looked indistinguishable in our raincoats
and where we jointly suspended
our disbelief in
united states
as though from a slender wire
in November.
Expand the focus to great-aunts and -uncles, cousins at one remove, and beyond, and the sense of not belonging becomes absurd. And yet the sense that a veterans event belongs to certain side of the political spectrum is strong in my region and our time.
I find myself both affirming and contradicting the old saw about growing more conservative with age (if you're not a Communist before age 30, you have no heart -- if you are a Communist after age 30, you have no head, etc). One of my high school classmates has been a police officer in our hometown for nearly 30 years. I'm glad he's there doing that work, even though he spews nonsense on FB and scoffs at gun control. He's always glad to see me, whenever I'm home, and hearts my family photos. I really don't think we are enemies, even though he would dearly love to ban books that I'd equally love to teach.
You're reminding me of a fantasy I had back when the war broke out in Ukraine, and one that has come back to me while watching Band of Brothers and The Pacific -- that sense of purpose being reduced to piercing clarity. I remember thinking that I would almost welcome the chance to go fight to the death for my home. This feeling came after watching one of Zelensky's selfie videos with a few comrades. After a bunch of stern and stoic preaching, his face softened and he closed with something like, "Love to Ukraine." That lack of any ambiguity -- the certainty that there was something worth defending with your life, that it was precious, that it brought everyone together -- was compelling.
I know it's a fantasy. There was some genuine camaraderie among the men of my grandfather's generation. And I'm sure that there will be something like that among the survivors in Ukraine. But it comes with scars and terror, as we're seeing in Israel and Gaza, and there's no lingering glory in it, really, except in the praise that sometimes comes from others. This was the delusion that drew Claude Wheeler to France in Cather's ONE OF OURS, where he met his end believing his country (paraphrasing Cather) better than it was and France better than any country can ever be.
I hit that block in these public gatherings, too. There's a kind of necessary fading into myth, and so often that collective myth -- the place where we could all believe we belong together -- is so patently false that it feels like a hymn in church. Amazing Grace, really? Who are we kidding. I often try and fail to live in that dream.
I spent this evening listening to a survivor of the Rwanda genocide tell his heartbreaking story. He lost his entire extended family except his younger sister. I became friends with his niece this week, a beautiful young woman born in the shadow of that holocaust.
Rwanda is very personal to me because a friend I worked with in Zimbabwe was the chief of party in Rwanda for the aid agency we both worked for. He refused to evacuate and took into his home more than a dozen Tutsi orphans. Because of his courage, his white privilege, and his passport privilege, he saved those children from being slaughtered.
The Hutus and Tutsis were neighbors, friends, and intermarried before the genocide. They spoke the same language and looked alike, yet somehow hatred got a foothold and somewhere between 800k -1.2 million people were butchered. It’s a stain on humanity and it’s a scar in my memory, but the reasons for the genocide are not so different from the things that divide Americans.
I lived in Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland when Robert Mugabe sent his North-Korean trained 5th Brigade to murder as many as 20,000 people. I heard his helicopters fly over our rural home at night and heard machine gun fire in nearby villages. It was called the Gukurahundi, “the early rain that washes away the chaff.”
12 people I knew who were living in a multiracial community called New Adam’s Farm were attacked by anti-Mugabe dissidents, separated by race, and those with white skin were locked into an animal shed. Over the next two days, they were hacked to death with machetes in full view of those still waiting their turns until only a little 12 year-old girl was left to tell what happened, all because political beliefs and ethnic hatred was allowed to boil over.
There is more I could tell about things I witnessed in the Balkans, in the Caucuses, in Somalia, in Sudan, and in all the other miserable places I spent my life trying to help put back together but what’s the point? The differences between people in Zimbabwe were not so different from what we are experiencing in America, where progressives think conservatives are stupid and conservatives think progressives are evil.
The division will continue to metastasize until some of us choose to look away from the silly political differences we are all too willing to kill one another for and realize we are neighbors who could find much more common ground with one another than we are now willing to admit.
Sometimes I am not hopeful, but sometimes events dispel my hopelessness. Rwanda is healing because Tutsis and Hutus reconcile as they choose to confess and as they choose to forgive. Is it possible for Americans to find a broad middle ground where we too can reconcile and become neighbors again?