Dear Edwards Church Community,
In the last full week of January Smith College hosted two prominent broadcast journalists, Rachel Maddow and Ana Navarro, and asked them to reflect on the recent election. They spoke on different days and, although each had her own perspective, I was struck by something they share.
In the Q&A period after Rachel Maddow’s prepared remarks, a Smith student asked for advice about how to adapt when she moves after graduation to a part of the country where values are different from those in the majority of Northampton and the Northeast. Maddow, whose home is here in the Valley, advised the younger woman to make friends with folks with whom she disagrees. (She also advised her to be careful, which I heard as akin to Ronald Regan’s famous arms control quip to “trust, but verify.”)
In her remarks, Ana Navarro also encouraged the audience to engage with people of different opinions. “For me, our biggest problem we face today is the political balkanization of America. We have lost our ability to embrace diversity of thought.” As a life-long Republican who did not support President Trump in the election, Navarro can probably relate more easily to disappointed Democrats and others who did not support him, than she can to voters who did. This does not undermine her observation about our loss of ability to embrace diversity or Maddow’s advice to that student.
Over the coming months and years, I fear the voices from all sides (and there are more than two sides) will only grow louder in escalating efforts to overwhelm each other. There are values worth fighting for, after all. But I worry that if we cannot reclaim and deepen the capacity to embrace diversity of thought, if we cannot make friends with people who think differently than we do, we may lose something else. The methods we use condition the results we obtain, and we risk devolving into mutual demonizing.
I recognize what is at stake. In his first week in office, President Trump has taken steps to reverse as many of President Obama’s policies as possible. As Obama said shortly after taking office, “Elections have consequences.” Later Senator Mitch McConnell made his famous remark about doing everything in his power to make Obama a one term President. We could easily go down the path of tit for tat, but as Ghandi observed, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Whether your sympathies were with the crowds who marched on Washington (and Boston, Greenfield, etc.) or the crowds who celebrated the inauguration the day before, ask yourself if you already have a friend or family member with whom you know you disagree. Is there a way to deepen the friendship, maybe repair the breach with the mother or sister who “unfriended” you on social media? If you could make a new friend, and not have as a requirement that they change their thinking to agree with you, wouldn’t that still be a friend worth making? “And who is my neighbor?” the self-righteous lawyer asked Jesus.
Go make peace,