By Tom H. Hastings
Many folks seem eager to reset with Putin, reset with China, reset with Iran, maybe reset with Turkey. That’s okay.
How about we reset amongst ourselves? This would take some commitments:
- No matter how provocative the words, physical violence amongst Americans should be a serious violation of our national social norms. But what if he says Israel is only defending itself? I need to punch him out. No, you don’t. That is not okay. Free speech means you get to say things that I despise, but I don’t get to then physically harm you.
- Every citizen who is of voting age should be able to vote unless they have been convicted of a violent crime and are incarcerated. That would lead to actually fair elections. But deadbeats, ignoramuses, and very stupid people with poor values would get to vote and we have to exclude them to get the best elected officials. No, we don’t. Excluding certain demographics is not democracy. Any denial of entire groups of law-abiding citizens is an unethical power grab. Any underhanded way to do so–voter suppression, gerrymandering–is unAmerican.
- We will commit to honestly considering all initiatives, policy statements, political positions, and cultural claims. Look, I can’t go against Trump on anything or he will blackball me, primary me, belittle me, and just ruin me. Seriously? No. That is not okay. We all have our moral and ethical guidelines and positions. Nobody can violate your basic ethics and expect you to go along. I try to understand conflict through a trauma-informed lens. I support the right of Jews–targeted for genocide in Europe and simply wanting a tiny homeland in the Holy Land. I support Palestinian sovereign statehood as displaced and oppressed victims of victims. I will never, however, agree with the hoodlums who applaud attacking a peaceful demonstration who support releasing Israeli hostages from Hamas control. I will never support those who support murdering two Israeli diplomats. This should be basic Americanism.
- We do not practice cancel culture. She doesn’t support a male-to-female trans person competing in girls’ athletic events, so she is called out and cancelled as transphobic. Um, isn’t that somewhat premature and possibly immature? Does she support female-to-male rights to compete as male? Does she give a line of reasoning perhaps based on her own past identity and experience as a female athlete suddenly competing against someone with serious athletic power who is transitioning and now asserts female identity? Is there some peer-reviewed science that says the transitioned athlete is now 100 percent female? Can we deal with the conundrum of the difference between socially identifying as female and yet athletically possibly still retaining male competition strengths? Is agreeing 100 percent with all politically “correct” positions required in order to avoid opprobrium, shunning, and cancellation? No. Stop it. America is pluralistic, not mandated opinion conformity.
- We will rise above juvenile binary good/evil, right/wrong, friend/enemy false dichotomy thinking and listen much more carefully to one another. I believe in Trump and everyone who doesn’t is evil. That is sophomoric, unAmerican, and desperately clueless. Popes don’t believe him or in him. Judges who were appointed by him rule against him. Our favorite musicians declare their opposition to many of his initiatives even as they also devote themselves to helping those with little power or resources. Can you enumerate what Trump says that you like and maybe mention something you wish he would stop? Losing the value of critical thinking is losing our intellectual and ethical edge that makes us American.
- Mostly, it’s okay to agree with some of what a political party or a particular political identity asserts while disagreeing with other pieces of it. If a group wants to drum you out because you are in disagreement with one plank in their platform, let them. They don’t deserve you, they don’t deserve a majority of voters or citizens, and they should and will shrink in power and influence.
We can all choose honest self-assessment and courageous assertion of point of view. To model this:
I have equal sympathy for Palestinians and Israelis, as well as equal condemnation of them. Both are far more traumatized than those who have no particular collective trauma in their history.
I want homeless cleared from our streets. I see blind people attacked for “touching” homeless peoples’ stuff as the blind person with a stick tries to simply walk down a sidewalk, and I see children passing by heaps of trash and human excrement as they walk to school. Clean this up. I pay a lot of taxes and will pay more to house more folks, but they need to be off the streets that our children and elders walk.
I want zero billionaires. Tax them into millionaire status, every one of them. Having a $100,000,000 is plenty for anyone. Just fix this. Uplift poor people with social services.
I want a sequence of events to end gun violence: 1) repeal the Second Amendment, 2) create massive gun buy-back initiatives, 3) outlaw all guns except hunting rifles, 4) after a few years of disarming the populace, disarm the police.
I want two amendments to our US Constitution: 1) outlaw any profits on armaments and instead make it solely a government manufacturing, profitless industry, while we figure out how to create an unarmed national defense force, and 2) mandate zero externalized costs, thus requiring all goods produced to set aside however much funding for future bioremediating the production, energy, packaging, and obsolescence costs. So, a packaged plastic geegaw must pay into the escrow account however much all these actual costs would be, making it inevitable that consumers would pay the real costs up front, not pass them along to the next generation.
I’m hoping Americans will seek, demand, and vote for actual peace candidates. There are few if any who ever get elected in our country. This should change.
Reduce our military budget by two-thirds, and use the funds to finally get universal health care.
We all have our beliefs and we should tolerate neither the cancel culture telling us to either support Dear Leader or face shunning, or the radical progressives ostracizing us if we don’t support Hamas and Daniel Ortega.
In short, time to grow up and skill up. Destructive conflict will destroy us and constructive conflict will save us. Our choice.
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs at Portland State University. His views, however, are not those of any institution.