Mired in a political predicament that seems unreal even as we live it, those of us looking for a road that leads away from the one the U.S. has been following for the last two years face a difficult challenge: learning how to talk across the chasm that divides our country. Without more bipartisan conversations, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll rebuild our democracy.
In a recent Washington Post opinion column (“Americans Stay Silent on Issues Out of Fear,” Oct. 17) Charles Lane wrote that citizens fear ridicule and harassment if they express their political views among people who don’t share them.
According to Lane, More in Common, a nonprofit studying political polarization in the hope of healing it, says 80 percent of us blame either “hate speech” or “political correctness” for the difficulty we have when we search for common ground.
Like many people I know, I’ve wondered if political humor that calls attention to the absurdities emerging from our nation’s capital might help.
But even the large audiences that enjoy late night comedy are what folklorists sometimes call “closed groups.” They tend, especially these days, to share similar opinions. Professional comics are good at judging their audiences, which the rest of us do when we predict a joke that worked well among pals is likely to bomb at Thanksgiving dinner. Jokes seem unlikely to bridge the political fear and hatred that divide our country now.
From different angles, the first two plays of the season at White River Junction’s Northern Stage considered the challenge we face.
In J.T. Rogers’ Oslo, Israelis and Palestinians seek to span a huge political and cultural chasm.
The play is based on negotiations that led to the Oslo Accord in 1993. Weighed down by inherited hatred, stereotypes and mistrust, the Israelis and Palestinians reluctantly agree to meet secretly, despite little confidence they can reach an agreement their leaders will accept.
But a Norwegian husband and wife who want them to succeed are helpful, and the negotiators take steps toward peace.
We know the Oslo efforts failed. But in Oslo J.T. Rogers imagines how people can form friendships that help them change their minds and come to trust each other. And he imagines convincingly how people without power are able to influence their leaders.
In Dear Elizabeth, playwright Sarah Ruhl uses parts of the powerful correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell to show how they built a friendship profoundly important to both of them despite deep differences.
Hearing Bishop and Lowell’s letters beautifully performed in Dear Elizabeth, I thought of Jon Silkin, a British poet I met at a dinner in 1966. It was a small gathering of academics, and I was surprised by how unguarded and honest, even vulnerable, Silkin seemed, as though all of us were his intimate friends, although none of us actually were.
In the letters performed in Dear Elizabeth, I heard profound mutual trust. It was as if Bishop and Lowell sensed after their first meeting a deep honesty in each other and built their friendship over the years on that trust.
In a “Spot On” community conversation sponsored by Northern Stage that was focused partly on Dear Elizabeth, Chard deNiord, Vermont’s poet laureate, talked about democracy, poetry and imagination.
Those of us who live as citizens in a democracy, deNiord seemed to be saying, need to think like poets. We need to imagine how strangers see the world. We need to see beyond our differences to what we have in common.
Timothy Perry Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, recently suggested another way people find a path toward common ground: thinking as young students are learning to do.
“The idea,” he wrote in an Oct. 21 Washington Post column, “is a new kind of school sports team in which athletes with and without intellectual disabilities play together.” Shriver was describing something already happening in some elementary, middle and high schools around the country.
The key, Shriver suggests, is for estranged people simply to get together — to meet.
He tells about Ponaganset High School in Rhode Island, where student leaders have set out “to counter bullying and to end a climate of tension and hostility.” They pledge to include “the lonely, the isolated, the left out, the challenged and the bullied” in their community life.
One of the ways they approach this goal is to create “unified teams” that include students with intellectual disabilities.
Those disabled students — kids who know how it feels to be ridiculed and marginalized — become the teachers.
“And slowly,” Shriver wrote, “fears and labels recede, and what’s left is just another human being, eager to matter, eager to contribute, eager to belong.”
In the two years since our polarizing 2016 election, Democrats and Republicans, goaded by our president’s take-no-prisoners approach to politics, have come increasingly to fear and loathe each other.
But maybe the results of our 2018 elections, a shift toward more balanced power in the U.S. Congress and in some state governments too, will help comedians satirize Democrats as well as Republicans, making laughter genuinely healing.
So maybe comedians, poets, skilled diplomats, and young athletes can help us find the places, the occasions, and the language we need to converse across this dangerous divide.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.