political division – Memphis Flyer

“Elections, when done right, are tens of millions of tiny healing moments.”

I read that line on my LinkedIn feed and immediately stopped scrolling. I’ve been dreading 2024 for several years, in fear of the increasing division in our country.

But what if we flip that narrative? What if we look upon 2024 as an opportunity to change our national dynamics, deliberately using the coming months to create American connection?

It’s possible. Research shows that we are so divided into our tribes that we don’t really know each other. One study found Republicans believed 30 percent of Democrats are atheist or agnostic. The reality? Only 8 percent of Democrats identified that way. Democrats believed that 38 percent of Republicans earn more than $250,000. The facts? Only 2 percent did.

There’s a lot more common ground than we think. We need to get to know each other again. Understanding our neurobiology helps. We are hardwired to sense a threat if we feel isolated, looked down on, or treated unfairly. We shut down or lash out — not great for our communities.

Fortunately, we also are hardwired to thrive when we feel connected, respected, and treated fairly. We feel safe and open to collaboration and creative thinking.

How can we deliberately use this election year to reduce our sense of threat and increase our feeling of connection and community?

As individuals, we can get curious about this amazing country of ours. How do other Americans arrive at their points of view on issues and candidates? Ask, “What experiences have led you to that belief?” and see how well you can listen to learn. You’ll probably find the other person is more complicated than you expected, and they will do the same with you. You just might have more in common than you thought.

There are also things we can do at the community level to foster a sense of belonging and fairness.

• Organize small events or initiatives that bring different sorts of people together in your community. Perhaps a food drive to help those in need or a park clean-up day as spring comes. Add some socializing time to an event that is already planned — like bringing drinks and snacks to a PTA meeting. Nurturing community works with our neurobiology, making us feel safer and more connected.

• Hold community leaders to high standards. Urge your local candidates to pledge publicly to “keep it clean,” treating each other and voters with respect and not using hateful or divisive speech. Expecting better election talk from leaders is key to creating the communities we want for our families.

• Support our wonderfully robust American civic culture. Can you talk with others about the importance of voting, particularly to young people? Can you join a nonpartisan registration drive, such as those run by the League of Women Voters? Can you offer rides to the polls? Can you be a poll worker? All of these serve the connection and fairness needs we have, enabling our communities to thrive.

Our elections are ours to control. We can make them healing rather than hurtful. We have the tools and we have time. What can we do, starting now?

Melinda Burrell, PhD, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a former humanitarian aid worker and now trains on the neuroscience of communication and conflict. She is vice-chair of the National Association for Community Mediation, which offers resources for community approaches to difficult issues.

This being a post-election week in which some politicians are exulting in victory and others are, in a strictly figurative sense, licking their wounds, it might prove useful to remember that there are numerous of our fellow

citizens out there for whom words signifying the high side and low side of combat are not metaphors at all but tokens of literal life-and-death situations they encountered in the service of their country.

These are our veterans, who were honored this week in a national holiday named for them — the living and the dead and those, for that matter, whose service in uniform is continuing and who stand ready to answer the next call to arms or national emergencies of other kinds.

Even as we took this brief time-out to commemorate our brothers and sisters who have performed such service, we were mindful of perils that belong not merely to the mystic chords of memory that Lincoln spoke of but to the present, to what we are used to calling “real time.”

We are aware that a war we once considered over, the one in Iraq, is anything but, and that President Obama has begun the kind of gradual reassignment of military personnel there, and possibly elsewhere in the Middle East, that a recent generation grew unhappily familiar with in the case of Vietnam. “Mission creep” is the term of art for what may be about to happen. There is even a sense in which a potential long-term struggle against the new specter called ISIS resembles the former one against an enemy that went by the name of Viet Cong. That one also started out as a cautious commitment of military “advisers” and air support.

We are not attempting here to judge the pros and cons of such a commitment, although it is surely the patriotic duty of our newly elected representatives in Congress to make just such an effort, as it is incumbent on them and on the president to be ever mindful of opportunities for peace and for the resolution of the world’s intractable animosities.

It is all the more necessary to exercise careful judgment at the highest councils of government because the grunts who do the dirty work at the risk of their lives are duty-bound by the requirements of their oath of service to do what they are called upon to do.

Really, we can’t say it any better than Abraham Lincoln did: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”