Lately, I keep hearing in my memory Rodney King’s plea for peace: “Can we all get along?”
King was the Los Angeles cab driver tazed and beaten by police after a car chase one night in 1991. A video of the brutal incident sparked outrage. Later, when officers were acquitted, riots erupted and 53 people died.
King then spoke to the press, urging people to cool it.
“Can we all get along?” he asked quaveringly in his call for calm.
It’s still an urgent question. It’s being asked again after the shooting rampage by an Illinois madman against Republican legislators practicing baseball. U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, who nearly died, will endure long, exhausting, painful therapies after multiple surgeries.
The shooter was warped by delusions that Republican legislators are somehow responsible for his own failures or for failings in this divided country. Like many a lunatic before him, that gunman – a terrorist if only by default – thought violence would solve something. It doesn’t; it never does; it never solves anything.
“Can we all get along?”
Some legislators say the baseball shooting made them realize they are all “one family” under attack. They proclaimed it’s time to work together, to compromise, to help solve the nation’s problems. Can they all get along? Let’s not hold our breath. We’ve heard cotton-candy sentiment before. Golly gosh, wouldn’t it be nice?
Let’s get real: The divisions between Democrats and Republicans are entrenched ones – hard to budge, hard to bridge. In a democracy, conflicts can be good. They are like the irritants in the oyster shell that can produce pearls of decency, kindness and human progress. Thus, in an abrasive tug-of-war between political parties, ingenious and workable compromises are sometimes achieved: the Social Security Act, civil-rights laws, Medicare and – more recently – the Reagan-Moynihan compromise to help make Social Security more financially stable; the Clinton-Republican compromise on welfare reform (“workfare”); the efforts to come up with a comprehensive immigration-reform plan. That proposal once had a bipartisan framework. It could be dusted off and reinvigorated if only they would all get along.
Extreme polarities are nothing new. In fact, they practically define the lurching course of American history: colonial loyalists vs. revolutionaries, slave-holders vs. abolitionists, women’s right-to-vote marchers vs. their opponents, war hawks vs. war protestors, segregationists vs. integrationists, federal rights vs. states’ rights, ad infinitum. Those conflicts served as crucibles from which enlightenment and justice emerged bit by bit. Yes, it all took too long because democracy, alas, is a slow-poke.
The United States has always been, more or less, the “Disunited States.” We should not be surprised it still is: abortion-rights advocates vs. anti-abortion activists, gun-rights absolutists vs. gun-restrictions proponents, legal same-sex marriage supporters vs. those who oppose it, ObamaCare enthusiasts vs. those who abhor it, climate-change adherents vs. those who think it’s a hoax; people who loathe the Trump presidency vs. the ones who laud it; facts vs. alternate facts; people who call for building walls vs. those who want to tear walls down.
We can justifiably blame legislators for deadlock, but – let’s face it – most of the rest of us can hardly agree or compromise any more than they can. Some of these rifts cannot be compromised away, especially the ones involving deeply held convictions that are religious and/or emotional.
All of us tend to become entrenched, with our own good reasons, into our own belief systems based on upbringing, economic-social class, family, friends, professions and so on. It’s understandable, but such ingrained attitudes can keep us at loggerheads. Great leaders transcend those polarities. They find rock-bottom human commonalities to which all people can rally ‘round, such as – to name obvious ones – clean food, air, water, mutual respect and decent-paying jobs.
And that’s what is needed: good leaders. Leaders who can illuminate the dark passageways between the buried bunkers that divide us.
Can we all get along? A day will arrive with breathtaking speed when we will finally understand we have no choice, that we will have to get along. Otherwise, monstrous violence will engulf us all. Studies show members of the younger generation are less ideological and more open-minded in their outlooks. Less entrenched. Therein, perhaps, lies our hope.
Meantime, we must shout out to condemn violence. It’s no solution for anything, period. Anyone who doubts that should go ask the dead dictators and terrorist fools who have buried themselves, forever disgraced, under the rubble of their crumbled delusions.
Let’s all send get-well cards to: Rep. Steve Scalise, MedStar Washington Hospital Center, 110 Irving St. NW, Washington, DC 20010.
