Ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply concerned for my country. Before I go into what I am referring to, I would like to explain my perspective on things. I am a 44-year-old white man that went to predominantly white schools my entire life. Most of my friends have been predominantly white and the churches I have attended in my life have been mostly white as well. I am the very definition of white privilege, and if you add in the fact that I am a male, I could be the face of white male privilege. I joined the military when I was 18 because I grew up in a military family and I had a love for my country that compelled me to serve. I genuinely love the ideals of our founding fathers and I genuinely believe that our country is still the best place to live, no matter the warts. With that bit of perspective, let's discuss why I am so scared.
It is 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning as I write this and all is not well. Over the last week, we have seen a firestorm of emotions consuming our country. Two black men have lost their lives in seemingly unnecessarily fatal encounters with police in Minnesota and Louisiana; five police officers were straight up murdered in Dallas, Texas; and perhaps most alarmingly Bristol, Tennessee had to deal with an active shooter the other day in the streets of what is essentially a small town. When you grow up in a rural, country area, you hear about these things happening in the big cities and you tend to thank your lucky stars to live in an area where these things don't happen. The realization that this is not the case is jarring, to say the least. That said, it is not that these things are coming to our small towns that scares me, it's something far deeper.
In 2016, we find ourselves deeply entrenched in what is shaping up to be the most contentious presidential election in a lifetime. Now please don't get me wrong here. It is not my intent here to blame one party or the other or to claim that some politician is at fault for these issues. My intent in pointing this out is to show that there are more issues going on in my country than just what is going on between the police and minorities.
One of the things I have learned as a communications major these last half dozen years is to look beneath the surface of what is being said for deeper meaning. The thing that is scaring me the most about what has been going on this last week is the further entrenchment of people into opposing camps in these situations. It has been going on for years now, but it seems to be getting worse. It started earlier this year as people were becoming entrenched into opposing political camps, even among the parties. On the Republican side, we saw the Trump supporters do battle with the Cruz supporters in what became an ugly confrontation. On the Democratic side, the Bernie supporters and Hillary supporters have traded increasingly ugly barbs while the primaries played out. Supporters being passionate about their candidates does not scare me, you should be passionate about the person you choose to support. What scares me is the entrenchment into a position that does not allow for opposing thoughts to be considered. The thought that if they do not share my opinion, they must be wrong and trying to destroy my way of life. I have seen this sort of mentality play out over the last week. When the two young black men got killed on back to back nights in Minnesota and Louisiana, the narrative on social media quickly turned to one of either outrage for the actions of the police or to admonishment of the slain that they "had" to be in the wrong. The next day or two, when the assailant killed those five police officers in Dallas, Texas, that conversation turned real ugly, as those that support the police started to admonish those that would dare question the actions of the police. I literally had a friend tell me that there was no middle ground, that I was either for the police or against them when I mentioned that the two black men did not "need" or "have" to die.
This is what scares me. As a society, we are not talking to one another any more. We find like-minded people and we become entrenched in our camps and we refuse to budge on what we believe. Our nation was not founded by a group of people that refused to compromise. Quite the contrary, it was our compromises that allowed for the creation of our wonderful nation. What is even more disturbing than our unwillingness to compromise is our unwillingness to even talk about the issues at all. The moment a dissenting opinion is uttered, it becomes time to attack them and instruct them on how wrong they are. Abraham Lincoln famously said, "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." I genuinely believe that the unwillingness to engage one another in open discussion of our differing opinions is the beginning of that destruction. It is time that we come out of our entrenchments and come to the table and figure these problems out and stop killing each other in the streets. Coming from a man that joined the military at 18, this is not the country that I chose to serve and defend. It scares me that my country is hurting and that no one seems to be willing to put forth the effort to heal it.
