August 3, 2016
Page 7
O PINION
It Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’
Building unity
with shared
values
by i saiah
J. P oole
It’s increasingly
easy to believe that
our country is irrec-
oncilably divided.
But that’s not quite
the America that
Michael Morrill saw
from his perch in Reading, Penn.
the weekend before the Republi-
can convention in Cleveland.
Morrill, the executive director
of Keystone Progress, was coor-
dinating several “doorstep con-
ventions” in Pennsylvania that
weekend — not big gatherings
in expensive halls, but one-on-
one conversations at the homes
of likely voters about the issues
that concern them.
Many of these conversations
were with the kind of white
working-class voters that Re-
publican presidential candidate
Donald Trump is relying on to
carry him into the White House
in November. But Morrill was
surprised by what he heard.
“We had planned to find a
lot of Trump voters,” he said,
even in the mostly Democratic
enclaves of Reading, Erie, and
Lancaster that are home to many
of the kinds of voters Trump is
targeting. “To our surprise, we
found no one who was a regis-
tered Democrat who was voting
for Donald Trump.”
That flies in the face of
some conventional wisdom
that white working-class
voters in particular, dev-
astated by the 2008 finan-
cial crash under President
George W. Bush and left
behind by the anemic re-
covery under President Obama,
are united behind Trump’s will-
ingness to blame their plight on
immigrants and other marginal-
ized groups.
Instead, organizers found,
people were receptive to the idea
that it was decades of corpo-
rate-friendly economic policies
in Washington — not neighbors
who don’t look like them — that
had made it harder to make a liv-
ing.
In the New Jersey communi-
ties of Hackensack and Teaneck,
canvassers and the residents they
visited traded stories about their
struggles supporting their house-
holds. As one canvasser put it,
they shared the same conclusion:
“It shouldn’t be this hard.” That
opened the door to conversations
about the family-friendly poli-
cies they should be fighting for
together.
Almost 1,800 such door-to-
door sessions took place in 15
states around the country, orga-
nized by People’s Action, Center
for Community Change Action,
MoveOn.org, and more than a
dozen local organizations.
LeeAnn Hall, co-director
of People’s Action, explained
the initiative as an effort to get
“neighbors having conversa-
tions with neighbors” about “a
real economic agenda that takes
power from corporations and
wealthy elites and puts it back in
the hands of the people.”
“We can’t solve the serious
problems facing our country
with more division and more
hate,” she said.
In Maryland, the door knock-
ers talked to voters about par-
ticular county and state issues,
such as a Howard County voter
initiative for publicly funded
small-donor elections that sup-
porters tout as a model for state-
wide reform, said Larry Staf-
ford, the director of Progressive
Maryland.
In white working-class sub-
urbs of Detroit, many of the
doorstep conversations centered
around race. Here, as in Pennsyl-
vania, canvassers were surprised
by what they discovered.
“We didn’t expect those con-
versations to be easy,” said Ba-
tosz Kumor, a Polish immigrant
who works with a group called
Michigan United. But he said
he believed the conversations
were necessary because “one of
the major impediments to deep
transformation in the American
economy and politically is that
we’ve been running away from
conversations about race.”
Even though he encountered
views about race that were at
odds with his own view of how
structural racism permeates
American society, he said he was
surprised by how constructive
some of his encounters were.
Doorstep convention orga-
nizers are now comparing notes
from the people they met and
planning more door-knocking
campaigns.
But one lesson is already
clear: The antidote to the over-
heated politics of us-against-
them — especially when “us”
and “them” are both prey to
exploitation and deprivation by
corporate predators — is get-
ting people to talk to each other
about a progressive agenda that
unites and lifts up people based
on the struggles and hopes they
share.
Isaiah J. Poole is the online
communications director at
Campaign for America’s Future.
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Converting from Hate to Peace and Justice
Some measures
to slow down a
runaway train
t oM h. h astings
With our dai-
ly news running to
atrocity after trag-
edy, Americans are
frightened and angry.
Some are resonating
with hate talk radio
hosts like Rush Lim-
baugh or quintessentially enraged
TV bloviators like Bill O’Reilly.
This gets them pushed toward
candidates who use the same or
similar self-righteous militarized
rhetoric. It paints Americans as
victims, the system as rigged
against us, and the world full of
ungrateful evil misfits who un-
justly hate and attack us.
This strand of candidate sees
its exemplar in Donald Trump,
of course, but the angry white
man rhetoric runs like a bright
red thread throughout the entire
by
rightwing side of the American
political landscape. The risi-
ble reaction from Paul Ryan to
overt racism, when he builds at
least a good portion of his career
and base on covert, dog-whistle
structural racism, should
tell us something.
But can we imagine a
solution that does not in-
volve even more hyper-mil-
itarization than we already
see, with the US attacking
in at least eight countries
around the world, against
whomever it likes, at will? Can
we foresee a day when our pay-
checks are not shredded by Pen-
tagon expenses that gobble up
half our tax dollars every year?
In my field of conflict trans-
formation we can envision a con-
version to that world, that struc-
ture, that social civilization that
spends its resources on life-af-
firming goods and services, that
has a robust safety net for all,
and that draws no hatred from
those who live in other places of
the world. That vision is only a
fantasy unless we offer realistic
steps to achieve it, of course, so
that is what we study, research,
and teach.
Frankly, we are barreling
down the tracks on a runaway
militarized train of hatred and
fear right now, so our first baby
steps are needed to slow, stop,
and ultimately change course
onto a much better track, the
track of peace and justice.
To begin, we might do best by
taking these measures:
-Increasing funding and em-
phasis on research to determine
both anecdotally and empirical-
ly the salient characteristics of a
society that has strong indictors
of social justice, civil discourse,
peaceful relations with others,
prosperity for most, and citizen
satisfaction.
-Begin pilot projects that ex-
periment with incorporating the
findings of such research into
portions of our American cul-
ture.
-Begin decreasing our heavy
dependence on global military
dominance and start shifting to
projects that feature collabora-
tion rather than fierce and force-
ful competition.
None of these changes are
major and all could inform us
about the possibilities. The good
news is that research already ex-
ists that can help us take these
steps with confidence and suc-
cess. Then, as we see the relative
benefits and low comparative
costs, we can make additional
informed decisions.
Right now, sadly, we are rac-
ing to the bottom. Before we hit
it, and please understand that
the bottom is the use of nucle-
ar weapons by a US President
acting while full of irrational
blind hatred, can we access our
big human brains that know how
to imagine, to dream, to create
workable new paths to peace and
prosperity? It is truly up to us.
Tom H. Hastings is found-
ing director of PeaceVoice and
assistant professor of conflict
resolution at Portland State Uni-
versity.
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