America, Can We Please Grow Up?

Seriously. I mean this as a real query: can we please grow up? 

I didn’t like the behaviors I observed on the playground in the 7th grade when I was in 7th grade and I like them even less five decades later. 

The leader of the geek attorney squad, Billy Barr, just got caught on video raspily whispering out of one side of his mouth to the editor of the school newspaper, “No, there was no election fraud. Not substantive fraud, anyway.”  

The top science whiz, Far-Out Manjoo, is worried. His concerns whip through the gossip chain like California wildfires, “Now that there’s a vaccine, will people even take it?”  

The smartest girl in the entire school—we all know who she is, the one unanimously destined to be valedictorian—is wondering whether it is her moral obligation to stop speaking to her red-hatted friends and associates? 

Doesn’t that sound like middle school playground? It sure does to me. And, between us, it’s utterly ridiculous. 

Bill Barr didn’t speak up about the election process to protect the ego of his alleged bully protector. 

Farhad Manjoo is asking whether science or identity will rule the day. 

The Ethicist is delineating the moral obligations of call-out culture. 

Have we lost our minds, Beloved? 

Fortunately, Thomas L. Friedman spent an hour on the telephone with President-Elect Joe Biden which, by grace, redeemed this morning’s news cycle. Their conversation brings a welcome blast of sheer, inarguable sanity to the discourse.  

(And don’t you for one nano think that I am about to tout the centrist wisdom of Mr. Biden over and above all the rest of the deranged hue and cry. I’m not, but I am reacting quite strongly to their civility with one another, even when they disagree, as a welcome change from the usual cyclone of disrespect and name-calling.) 

Mr. Biden goes to the core of the red-blue polarity in one word, one concept. Dignity. 

“‘You know, it really does go to the issue of dignity, how you treat people. I think [rural Americans] just feel forgotten. I think we forgot them. I respect them,’ Biden added, and he plans to prove it by ‘tackling the virus’ in ‘red and blue areas alike.’” 

This is why his first priority, even before he officially takes office, is to pass a stimulus package. Now. Before Christmas. Before Hanukkah. Before Kwanzaa. Hell, before Inauguration Day. In Mr. Friedman’s words, “Biden’s top priority, he said, is getting a generous stimulus package through Congress, even before he takes office.” 

Not only that, but Mr. Biden goes beyond the polarization and into the granular nature of polarity, one of the principle tenets of physics on Planet Earth. He notes somberly, “We are courting serious long-term economic harm if we don’t deal with the fact that ‘you have over 10 million people out there who are worried [how] they can pay their next mortgage payment,’ and ‘you have a significantly higher number of people who have no ability to pay their rent.’”  

And are only still in their homes because of an eviction/foreclosure moratorium that ends, at least in New York State, on January 1, 2021, one month from yesterday. 

A friend told me this week that on Thanksgiving Day, in the good old U.S. of A., amidst the sparse Macy’s balloons, the taped performances, and their one-block Parade route, one in eight people in our country are food insecure. It’s higher if we’re just measuring children. 

Mr. Biden goes on, “A generous stimulus will actually generate economic growth without long-term fiscal harm if in the future ‘everybody pays their fair share, for God’s sake.’ And by that fair share, I mean there’s no reason why the top tax rate shouldn’t be 39.6 percent, which it was in the beginning of the Bush administration. There’s no reason why 91 Fortune 500 companies should be paying zero in taxes.” 

All of the federal benefits that have sustained state unemployment programs are set to expire the day after Christmas. Uh, Christmas 2020. 

Mr. Friedman notably inquired of Mr. Biden how he thought he would incur cooperation from Senate Majority Leader Mitch I-Won’t-Say-President-Elect-Aloud McConnell. Mr. Biden had a good, calm, reasonable answer. 

He cited earlier personal Senate experiences with Mr. McConnell. “I think there are trade-offs, that not all compromise is walking away from principle.”  

Not all compromise is walking away from principle. 

Compromise comes to us from Late Latin etymologically. It means to promise together. 

Mr. Biden again, “We got to figure out how to work together,” he said. Otherwise, “we’re in real trouble.” 

Farhad Manjoo observes, “Americans in 2020 exist in splintered realities. A large number of us believe one truth about Ukraine, face masks, hydroxychloroquine, climate change and the results of the presidential election; perhaps almost as large a number of us believe the opposite.” 

Uh-huh.  

So? 

Here’s a novel suggestion: let’s get off the playground, and into the classroom, then grow up and begin to learn about what we each want for ourselves and our families. Then let’s brainstorm—no idea is too silly—on the chalkboard. Anything goes—for ideas. 

I understand that at the level of ideology, there is a Great Abyss in this country, I do. I think so do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Ideology is the dinosaur-ization of ideas, Beloved, just as polarization is the furthest reach of the polarity spectrum.  

Okay, I get it, we disagree. Ideologically. Good enough. 

Now, what ideas do you have for going forward? Because, make no mistake, we will go forward, we are going forward—agreement/disagreement notwithstanding. What are the ideas that we can agree on without compromising our principles? 

Uh, housing for all, food for all, clean water and air for all, meaningful work for all, healthcare for all. Is there anything else? 

Oh yeah, freedom and justice for all. Welcome to Grown-Up World, America. 

Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her website is susancorso.com.