Reconciliation: 20

I increasingly fear that America is reaching a mindset where any disagreement that can’t be handled with fists is handled with a gun, and most Americans aren’t very good with their fists.

It seems to have gotten to the point that a reporter can’t even ask a politician a question without being physically assaulted. Believe what you will, but I believe that we, as a nation, are overdue for a long period of introspection, examining the roots of our anger.

After that, we might drift away from our obsessions with films and TV shows that consist of constant physical violence and the settlement of disagreements with ultra-violence, or simply “ultra-vio,” as Anthony Burgess called it in A Clockwork Orange. As for me, I have abandoned film and literature that embraces death and destruction as the only cures for our problems.

Can’t we just talk to one another anymore?

I write this from a farmhouse in rural Arkansas. The building has stood since the early 1900s on the site of a previous building that pre-dated the Civil War. My wife’s grandfather’s family moved here during The Great Depression. A short distance up a gravel road is another farmhouse, where a man lived who, according to my mother-in-law, was known locally simply as “Uncle Dutch.”

What is striking is how she recounts, “Uncle Dutch was a Republican and Daddy was a Democrat. On many an afternoon Uncle Dutch would walk down and he and Daddy would sit on the porch and argue politics.”

They called it “talking politics” down where my parents were raised, in LA or “lower Arkansas.” Over checkers (that game was allowed, but playing cards was a sin), they would engage in the topic of politics with friendly banter. The sharpest criticism I ever remember hearing was, “Calvin can’t help it. He’s a Republican. You can just tell.”

That’s far cry from “Lock her up. Lock her up.”

If I remember correctly, it was George Washington, the so-called “Father of the Country,” who said, “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”

When we fail to do this, we, I believe, embolden such groups as the Klu Kux Klan and the Aryan Nations. The further result is the creation of home-grown terrorists such as Dylann Roof or Timothy McVeigh. I think we would all agree that this needs to stop.

What can we do? I think maybe Marcus Aurelius gave us good guidance when he observed “He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.”

I would only add, using language from our national obsession with victory, “If we wish to conquer hatred, let us first conquer ourselves.”

The natural result of hatred