To Heal a Nation
My wife and I were still living in Freehold, NJ when the 1991 Halloween Storm hit.
For those that don’t recall, it was a meteorological mash-up that wreaked deadly havoc out at sea and visited a mess of destruction upon the Northeastern Seaboard, providing Sebastian Junger with the raw materials that would become his best-selling book, “The Perfect Storm.”
And yeah, there was the movie as well…
We were seeing and hearing stories about the storm’s impact on our favorite local beach towns, and headed down to Belmar, NJ, a day or two after the first wave of clean-up had removed mountains of sand and the biggest chunks of busted boardwalk that waves of storm-surge had deposited several blocks inland.
It was a beautiful, sunny day that, were it not for the mess still in the streets, walks and yards – to say nothing of heavy machinery, dump trucks and work crews that were visible everywhere except the ocean – it would have been just another lovely, bluebird mid-autumn day at the Jersey Shore.
Storms have a way of changing things, sometimes washing away stuff that, until it’s gone, can seem so blessedly permanent…
As if…
From my point of view, the fronts coming together in this longest of years – and even longer election cycle – created a perfect storm that, even with the results called in a manner totally consistent with American process and tradition, has left enough cultural detritus and division in its wake to challenge the cleaning capacity of the finest heavy machinery.
Masterful misinformation campaigns, skillfully practiced, self-serving enabling strategies – and so much more – have led to gaping social rifts that make twenty-foot pieces of shattered boardwalk left on lawns a quarter mile from the ocean seem like just another day at the office…
In other words, there are monumental messes and a whole lot of open wounds in need of healing.
We’re an enormous, diverse nation – and a people that has largely fallen into more dehumanizing “us versus them” traps than one could ever imagine…
And likely even more than we are even aware of.
Healing indeed…
As a couple of my mentors say, “If you drop love, it bounces. If you drop trust, it shatters.”
The popular New-Age idea of “Just trust!” is a paper-thin non-foundation constructed on Pollyanna, tooth-pick thin pilings set in loose sand…
Real, open-hearted trust – reliant on truth, vulnerability and integrity over time – is always and only built and earned over time.
Once that trust is broken it takes a long time to rebuild…
What’s also true is that just about every manner of trust has been dropped on the floor of this laboratory that is the American experiment.
Trust in systems, in processes, in institutions, in the warp and weft of the just about every fabric of our democracy…
And, perhaps most damaging, trust in one another…
Trust in neighbors…
Trust in members of our own family…
I truly wish I had a brilliant solution in mind, but I don’t.
I do have a strong opinion that showing up for the sole purpose of shouting down another’s ideas isn’t really a useful place to begin…
I’m also of the opinion that showing up with a loaded semi-automatic weapon across one’s chest might make a statement – but it is also an act of intimidation that either breaks or further damages trust…
Because the process of building trust, the solid foundation necessary to begin healing, can only begin when weapons – actual and metaphorical – are willingly set down.
I’d also suggest that developing the awareness to catch one’s self in the act of dehumanizing other – through name calling, role-assigning, belittling or otherwise “othering” or “them-ing” – is another important place to start…
And that work begins with dropping one’s own weapons and armor and willingly looking inside one’s self, because that’s where, you’ll find, the seeds of “us and them” have been planted.
It’s not easy work…
Nor is it pretty.
It is, however, time for the healing to begin.