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Whether John McCain or Barack Obama wins the Presidency next Tuesday, two things will be clear. First, the United States' electorate will be faced with recovering from a campaign that has left us emotionally overwrought, and in many instances, deeply scarred. The second is that somehow, more of us have to start really listening to each other across lines of difference if the next President is going to be able to effectively govern.
That really concerns me, because I've spent a fair amount of my life thinking about how to keep people engaged in public dialogue. It's a commitment I feel viscerally partially because of my own background, which I've explained to some degree in a previous BlogHer post. But it's a commitment I feel most deeply because I've learned that we pay a price when we stay in our own echo chambers, content to accept caricatures of those with whom we disagree.
Let me explain myself with a bit more of my autobiography.
At Princeton, I was profoundly affected by my work with Prof. Manfred Halpern, a politics professor whose study of Iran during the 1950s led him to develop a theory of transformation as it occurs in individuals, communities, and nations in history. (I am grateful to Tony Ercolano for his concise summary of Manfred's theory, which isn't easily described.) According to Halpern, there are eight fundamental relationships in the world, and each reflects a stage in the process of seeking a kind of personal and social equilibrium. Daily Princetonian writer Jessica Lautin brilliantly observed in a 2001 article that, "Politics, according to Halpern, was not an official contest for power, but rather an attempt at change through positive relationships." Through Manfred (as he preferred his students to call him), I also came to understand that nations are bound and propelled by shared myths, and that social progress requires the questioning, shattering and recasting of our "sacred" stories.
In this election, we are confronted with a transformative moment. Whether that transformation is positive depends, in part, on whether we can find a civil way to recast our central political myths. It's not just about the fact that come January, at least one of the occupants our our top political offices will not be a white male. It's the fact that our economic and energy crises have made us acutely aware of our vulnerability and interdependence in ways we've never had to confront before.
But back to Manfred.
In the spring of 1977, Manfred guided me through my own personal and political transformation during an independent study that required me to revisit a community in which I had worked two summers before. The South Philadelphia community of Tasker-Grays Ferry has been a racial cauldron for decades. Grays Ferry had once been the site of a mill, and the workers there had formed an Irish ethnic enclave that remained politically strong even as the mill closed and the jobs moved downtown. In the years after World War II, a black and Puerto Rican neighborhood had grown up beside it, with all of the animosities that come when people who don't have much feel compelled to defend themselves from people who have even less.
During the summer I worked there, I met lots of hardworking people of all races, along with some drug dealers, hustlers and other shady characters. I also had to deal with incidents of real or threatened violence. I was warned that a gang of Irish kids might attack the trackless trolley I rode to work and beat up people who weren't white. I heard regular stories about violence that poor blacks committed against each other, often over some petty matter.
I interviewed a man who said he had been beaten by a white mob because he was riding his bicycle in a white neighborhood at night, while police officers watched from a nearby cruiser. I saw the stitches in his head where medical personnel picked out bits of broken glass. When I had to walk through that neighborhood, I made sure that I was dressed up and carrying a briefcase -- I wanted to look as if I was operating in some official capacity, and that someone powerful would care if I was harmed. I remember people coming to their doors and watching as I walked down the street. I imagined that they wanted to be sure that I kept moving. I never had a chance to talk to them to learn what they were really thinking.
Working with Manfred,
