"Senator, please don't call me My Friend' unless you mean it..."
The following is an article I did a few years ago on a former blog. I have buffed it up a bit and am reposting it as it is more germane today than it was then.
This morning in one of the on-line papers, the story was out that some in Congress think the nation in more divided today than it was during the Civil War. If that is true, in full or even partially, we have big, big problems right now.
The main problem is we hate each other. We don't get along, we fight, and we agree on practically nothing. No, I am not talking about a relationship with a spouse - this is much more insidious. I am talking about how we act as a country.
A former Governor of Minnesota would refer to the Republicans and Democrats as "Crips and the Bloods". In other words, they were fighting like rival gangs, often demonstrating a visceral hatred for each other. Today rather than having one party in power and the other being the "loyal opposition", we now practice the politics of personal destruction as winning at all costs has trumped everything else.
This is not good for our country now (as we are embroiled in the war with terror) or during times of peace. We have problems - daunting problems which need to be addressed immediately. As the constituencies of each party have become so radically different from each other, finding common ground has been the first victim of this skirmish. With the country divided ideologically almost totally in half, any solution which does not involve finding common ground results in hard feelings and bitterness. The smell of blood in the water is so strong, we have minimized external threats in favor domestically attacking and damaging our national fabric. We have become the cancer and the host, both living in the same body.
What is really interesting is the root of the problem. We have danced around it, used synonyms, and code speak to describe it. Simply put, the real issue is money. Who will pay and how much will it be. Currently, nearly 50% of the people in this country pay no Federal income tax. As the nation's financial requirements increase, the solution seems straight forward. We can either raise taxes on the 50% who already pay taxes, borrow money, or print more money. The camps have become polarized into the "haves and the "have-nots", the makers and the takers or the crips and the bloods. We call each other every name we can think of, except fellow Americans.
Many of the 50% of the Americans who are paying the taxes say they have had enough. They don't mind paying their fair share, but there is a limit to how deep the well is. On the other hand, many of those who do not pay taxes believe that this is a fairness issue, a human dignity issue, and the ability to pay needs to be addressed in greater detail. In short, who is going to pay the tab is the core issue.
In absence of common ground, this issue has become just as polarizing as the abortion issue. We have lost all decorum on how to resolve or even discuss rudimentary solutions to this problem. In the not too distant past, it has been said that President Ronald Reagan would argue with Speaker Tip O'Neill during the day and at night play cribbage while sharing a glass of Scotch in the White House. They had policy disagreements, but they liked each other personally. Can you imagine Nancy Pelosi coming over to have some social time when George Bush was president after hours in the White House? It never happened because the political fight went on 24/7.
Many years ago, President Kennedy was told by the Soviet Union that they would "bury us" without having to fire a shot. The prophetic statement may come true sooner rather than later. If we can't learn to talk to each other rather than at each, or over each other, we will fail as a society. The old adage remains true - "United we stand, divided we fall". I think it is time to revisit the wisdom of that statement and look for common ground in our deliberations before we too, become a tragic learning point in world history.
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