The Divorce of a Nation

Sorry, this is bleak. Skip it if the last thing you need is more morbid analysis of the general state of things. After all, I am speaking up far too late and my sphere of influence is far too small for this reflection to be more than a glimpse into my fears over the past few years and distilling in the last week of dark events.

In short, I believe that we the people just went through a crucial test and I believe that we failed that test.

I know it is not in vogue right now to call for unity. To do so is tantamount to negotiating with terrorists, or so I’ve heard. Of course there are clearly dangerous actors at work who desire violence but I am not calling for unity with violent radicals no matter which political party they are affiliated with.

The two ideological factions in America are like a married couple on the brink of divorce. In such a factious marriage, partners would never try therapy unless a court ordered it for the sake of the children. We are like the children. Each of us may side with one or the other parent but we really want the marriage to survive.

The truth is, neither the violent rioters throughout the summer nor the insurrectionists last week represent even one percent of protestors in either case much less voters. None of this physical violence was perpetrated by our conservative or progressive friends and family. Still, the people of this nation, all together, have failed a crucial test.

Dr. John Gottman spent a decade on an extensive research project that focused on dynamics in a marital relationship that lead to divorce. It boiled down to four basic relational elements which, when present, predict a likely outcome of the death of a marriage. He called these the four horsemen: criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt.

I often ask couples which of these four elements was found to be most closely related to the complete collapse of a relationship and they often guess wrong. They are often surprised when I tell them that the answer is ‘contempt.’ When contempt has developed in a marriage, it is already broken.

Contempt replaces the other three harmful relational dynamics so that the energy that would otherwise be spent defending, attacking, or ignoring is all rolled into one hostile process in which a partner doesn’t even have to bother responding anymore. Contempt oozes with the message, “you aren’t even worth my time.” Also, “I laugh in the face of how ridiculous you are.” Contempt is smug and mocking.

I have invested in tough conversations with friends from both sides of the political aisle. As we compare experiences, I often discover that the inflammatory rhetoric they have encountered from the other side has been tremendously off-putting. In small but formative ways, loud aggressive voices have come to represent for them what the ‘other side’ is all about.

Many folks, previous to 2020, had not invested much energy into political or cultural goings on. So, comparing notes with them about what the ‘other’ is like, much is related to unkind rhetoric. It is clear that everyone has experienced a difference slice of ‘crazy.’ I have been shocked at how different their experiences have been from my own and vice versa.

So, when many newcomers to political debate began to tune in over the past four years, it was often because their beliefs were being contemptuously derided in open spaces. Each of us has experienced our own unique hellscape of madness depending largely on the political leanings of our Facebook friends and sometimes our real life associations. This contempt inflamed and entrenched almost everyone it touched. It influenced all of us.

“If you think <insert partisan perspective here> , you’re beyond help.”

“If you don’t agree with <insert partisan statement here>, either you are willfully uninformed or you are just stupid.

“If you voted for _____, then you are just _____.”

And so on. There were so many clever one liners based on dubious logic and data and each one did a little more damage than the one before. Each one of these zingers had an adverse effect on everyone who heard it. It did not persuade anyone. It either radicalized agreement or alienated disagreement.

Each one of these reckless and contemptuous comments seemed small and so satisfying or activating. It spread like a virus, gaining critical mass and snowballing into a self-perpetuating nightmare well before 2020 even began. Each contemptuous comment had a part to play in the death of a marriage as we are now slowly recognizing in the United States. We failed a big test of national unity on January 6th.

If common ground still existed, the test of last week’s danger would have brought it out in a big way. As it is, any semblance of a national identity seems to have been replaced with partisan interest.

During the very beginning stages of a scary and disorienting attack on the Capitol, before we even knew if the people’s representatives were going to live or die, the nation collectively chose faction over unity. While our very Capitol was being ransacked, there was very little national solidarity to be found in public media spaces.

Rather than speaking words to unite us all for just for one day, or even a few hours, the majority of both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, promptly began advancing partisan narratives to steer the conversation away from the very real threat of total chaos unfolding in front of us and into yet another argument.

Both immediately engaged in shakily accusatory comparisons between the looting and violence over the summer and the insurrection unfolding right before our very eyes. Both sides engaged in false equivalencies between these two tragedies. Do these conversations need to happen? Absolutely. Is it the first thing you need to see when the Capitol is under attack? Absolutely not.

The last time our nation faced mortal danger while we remained locked in combat with one another was in 1860. As it was then, so it is now: our primary loyalties are no longer with the whole country, they are with the causes we hold dear. More accurately, our primary loyalty is to defend against the malicious intentions we see on the other side threatening those causes.

This finger-pointing was so sudden and so widespread that it was almost as if these arguments had already been cooked up before the violence broke out. I dare say that is exactly what had happened. Both sides anticipated violence and were locked and loaded with ammo to spread further division. The union is broken. The marriage is dead.

Dwight Eisenhower once said, “People talk about the middle of the road as though it were unacceptable. Actually, all human problems, excepting morals, come into the gray areas. Things are not all black and white. There have to be compromises. The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.”

Many progressives are high on an overdose of confirmation bias and they need to turn it down about 100 degrees. Many conservatives are in full on panic mode and they would do well to pause and recalibrate. All of us need to remember that our fellow citizens are not our enemies.

Otherwise, we might as well accept the fact that these two factions are totally and irreparably split on a national scale. We are caught in the middle and must all prepare for a whole new reality right around the corner. Divorce is pending.

*****

Having written to this point, I put a few final edits on my work and turned off my monitor. I headed downstairs feeling dreadful. Having consumed a steady diet of news and commentary for the past week, I could think of little beyond the bleak projection I had outlined above.

Nora had gone to sleep and as we do every evening, Michelle and I caught up on the day. In a sort of offhanded way, she shared something that had happened earlier which had seemed mildly unusual but not entirely riveting from her perspective. It riveted me.

After visiting with a friend, Michelle was walking with Nora to the car when a young neighborhood boy of perhaps nine or ten caught sight of her from the bottom of the yard. He ran up to her, held out a small plastic bag, and said, “Happy Valentines Day!” With that, he quickly ran away without another word.

Puzzled, Michelle opened the bag and inside were two hearts made from zip ties decorated with shredded white and red tissue paper. The small gift smelled conspicuously of stale cigarette smoke and Michelle remarked that she wasn’t sure what to do with it.

I was floored. It was literally the opposite of everything I had been writing and musing about. This brief exchange wasn’t angry, impersonal or ignorant. Instead, it gave evidence of creativity, consideration, and courage. It was small and sweet and it cut through my hopelessness in a way that I was not prepared for.

Kindness and contempt cannot occupy the same space, they simply cannot. I have worked with couples on the brink of divorce. To reignite the friendship, one simple exercise I often suggest is to find two or three kind things per week for each to do for the other based on what they know about each other.

Over half of the effectiveness of therapy work is thought to be connected to factors unrelated to the therapy itself. They relate to factors in the lives of the clients and particularly to the level of hope and expectancy that recovery will happen.

My hope for the country is not connected at the moment to a recovery of life as we have known it. Sure, I pray that the shirtless Viking rampaging the Capitol remains the face of this dark chapter of American history but I suspect that the worst is ahead of us.

As long as neighborhood children can share Valentine’s Day gifts with total strangers in the middle of January, as long as we can turn our attention away from our phones and onto those in our immediate vicinity, we will maintain community. Real authentic community is the hope I see.

As Isaiah prophesied long ago, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this” (Isa. 9:6–7 KJV).