Conversations With My Neighbor

I live in the Toronto Metro area, a very diverse, densely populated, modern, cosmopolitan city. As might be expected, the politics of the area’s population leans sharply left. And I have a vacation residence about two hundred miles south of here, in the Southern Tier of New York State. Addison is a small village of farms and other small and family businesses. There is a sizable Amish community. The politics here leans sharply right.

When I drive down, I often turn on the radio and scan the am dial. There is quite a bit of religious programming, a portion of political talk radio, and even some stations that blend the two. Though I’ve been making this trip for eight years now, I continue to be astonished that political ‘norms’ can differ so completely over such a short geographical distance.

I met a neighbor six years ago who has helped us to settle in and maintain our property. And though we only have contact during the few short periods I’m down here every year, I’d say that we’ve become good friends. We hang out a bit, share meals and a beer, watch football and toke a little marijuana. We talk a lot, about life and everything in it. We’re close together in age though otherwise our life experiences have been very different.

Politics has been a difficult topic for us however. We tend have opposite opinions on just about any issue. So we’ve learned to tread carefully. We’ve had discussions that have descended into shouted, emotional salvos flying back and forth. And there have been many times, when on the brink of such, we’ve managed to “agree to disagree” and to get off of the subject.

We both see it as absolutely intolerable that the other side might prevail in the upcoming election. He feels that liberals are destroying America and that Trump’s reelection is essential to preventing its continuing slide. I feel that Trump is destroying America and that his ousting is essential to prevent a continuing slide. We both feel that a degree of armed revolt looms as a real possibility if Trump loses, and that in some respects a state of Civil War already exists. I think it’s fair to say that we both realize that his side is much better armed and prepared to fight than mine (as was the case at the start of the Civil War of the 1860s).

We both recognize that it is precisely this – the increasing impossibility of political opponents to even discuss matters civilly – that is at the core of America’s current dysfunction. Actually, it goes beyond that. We seem unable to even agree on the nature of the political universe that we share, or the challenges we face.

This is nothing new. For decades now, the abortion issue has been cast as a matter of the sanctity of life by one side and as the right of women to own their own bodies by the other. On the battlefield however, these positive values become twisted into their negatives: one side is accused of murdering children and the other of oppressing women, hateful charges on which there is no possibility of compromise.

Similarly, gun control devolves from a debate about the right to self-defense balanced against the right to community safety, to a pitched battle opposing those who are insensitive to the random murder of innocents to those insensitive to the loss of personal liberty.

And it keeps getting worse. Language itself is weaponized, and positive values are overtaken by their shadows. Black Lives Matter is translated into White Lives Don’t, and All Lives Matter is interpreted as Black Lives Don’t. Defund the Police becomes Let Anarchy Prevail, and Law & Order becomes White Supremacy Forever. Honest, serious debate becomes impossible when every word becomes a code word for something else. Negotiation can never progress when the worst interpretation of the other’s words becomes the only possible interpretation, when their most feared intentions are seen as the inevitable objectives.

My neighbor and I are at a kind of crossroads. It’s questionable whether our good rapport will continue if we both see the other as bent on the destruction of the country. What may save us is my certain knowledge that he wants things to be better, despite the fact that he envisions a completely different path to reaching better than I do. I hope that he knows the same about me. I know that my life is better with him as a friend than it would be without him. I trust that he feels the same.

Unfortunately, I believe we’re at a point where California believes that the US would be a better country without Alabama, Mississippi or Tennessee. And those states seem convinced that it would be a blessing if California collapsed into the Pacific tomorrow. How shall we overcome?