The ugliness that America has become
This is an ugly time in America.
All the hate and the self-righteousness and the bullying and the thoughtlessness. It's on the left. And on the right. Liberals who hate conservatives. Conservatives who hate liberals. So they strong-arm and they leverage and they bully and they force each others' hands.
It is the same rationalization used by Al Queda and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Taliban. It's the same rationalization used by Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro and Hu Jintao.
And, at this political moment, America and the world are using that rationalization to leverage in political disagreements that need more understanding and, instead, create more hate and enmity.
What is so ugly about it is that it is taken so seriously as some kind of substitute for more engaged, substantial debate, discussion, and understanding.
We know we should be behaving better. It's just easier and more momentarily convenient for us to behave with more swagger and bluster than it is to think and engage and understand more.
Bobby Kennedy's words the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King are as appropriate during this period of polarization and political struggle over a difficult and unpopular war as they were during a similar period when he offerred us these words.
"When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.
Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again."
