On Tuesday I wrote an Election Day letter to my granddaughter, telling her: “I want you to live in a world of trust, and I want you to know, little one, that what happens today, tomorrow, in coming weeks – whatever the result – is only the beginning of a renewed struggle to create, with respect and dignity, a world of beauty and love to which humanity is entitled” (tinyurl.com/yxnpdcwf).
I received an email this morning that commanded me: “FIGHT BACK – I know you have it in you.”
While the message was intended for someone with a political agenda opposite my own it rang true – I do have it in me!
I, along with the millions of Americans repulsed by the politics of dissension, hate, and fear, have it within ourselves to resist attempts to disenfranchise and delegitimize millions of American voters – have it within ourselves to create such a world.
The presidential campaign is over: voting is finished and, whatever the result that emerges I promise to fight to fulfill the promise to my granddaughter, a 21-month-old whom I have not seen for a year.
I will struggle to help create that world alongside neighbors – even with those with whom I disagree politically – to help heal a divided nation and find a common language – and interests – that will empower dialogue between parties with legitimate, competing visions of a sustainable and socially just American future.
Together, I hope, we can move to repudiate the pornography that has so polluted the Public Square, to resist those who collaborate with and appease hate-mongers, to resist those who attempt to exploit grievances and resentments in order to enhance their own power and profit.
One thing is very clear: This election has cast light on what happens when half an electorate goes to vote without fully knowing what has transpired in the world: domestically or internationally, historically or contemporaneously.
Vote without knowing what they do not know.
I believe that half of the electorate voted differently than I because, in part – through their own admission – they deliberately avoid any news or facts that contradict their preconceived opinions and bias.
There are two basic ways of trying to understand the world around us – exegetical and eisegetical.
The first, exegetical, is to attempt to listen and read text and news in order to find and understand its meaning and to not impose preconceived bias or prejudice.
The second, eisegetical, is to interpret text with deliberate presupposition, with preconceived opinion and bias in order to reinforce opinions already held.
While there are differences at all extremes of America’s political spectrum it strikes me that there is a much greater dependence on eisegetical thinking among many on the right – among those Americans who have chosen to self-quarantine themselves from truth and knowledge – than on our political left, where I live.
Those eisegetes who seek “truth” from FoxNews or America One; who read Breitbart, GatewayPundit, PJ Media, QAnon, and FrontPage, who follow Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Candace Owens, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage permit themselves – within their self-quarantined bubbles – to be deceived.
We all have, I believe, a propensity for bias, implicit or explicit. We all embrace what’s familiar to us and are often suspicious of the foreign or unusual.
It’s human. It’s hard to break away from beliefs and opinions – often formed in our youth – which comfort or reassure us.
But we have to do it: Daily, I watch Fox, often subjecting myself to Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham; daily, I listen to Rush and Sean and I often visit websites – even Islamophobic ones – to see what is happening in those worlds.
And I find, in those worlds, that it’s hard for spectators to see beyond delusion and denial, hard to acknowledge the tens of thousands of Americans killed by the president’s incompetence in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, hard to acknowledge children in cages, hard to see that our international relations are dangerously frayed – hard to acknowledge The Other.
Hard to acknowledge that we live in a world where we can’t get along without each other.
Yesterday, a friend told me that I needed to find a way to talk to the other half, to Americans who voted for Trump, who supported his ban on Muslims like myself, who believe in a faux-America based on prejudices and fears of people unlike themselves.
She was right.
I’m willing, if you’re willing to listen, if you’re willing to help create, with respect and dignity, a world of beauty and love to which humanity is entitled.
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be / I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. / I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. … For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” – Wendell Berry.
(Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.)