What will it take to close the wounds that separate families, neighbors and our country?
The past few weeks, months, years have been difficult for many of us to understand. It may be because our families raised us to believe we should leave this world better than we found it. Lately the challenge has been understanding how people are seeing what seems like black and white issues only as red and blue. We have truly become a country divided.
I’m convinced if individual human beings answered honestly, there would be many more degrees of goodness than evil in their answers and their beliefs.
Do we really have no feelings toward the nearly 200,000 families who have lost loved ones through COVID or more appropriately, complications from COVID? Do we really respect and want to display a flag that represented a philosophy that put over 6 million people to death because of their religious belief? Do we really embrace everything that the Confederacy stood for from slavery to tyrannical war against our own country? Do we really not want to control the Armageddon that we may be facing through climate change? Do we care at all about the poor, the marginalized and the suffering?
If the answer is even a maybe to some of these questions, I’ve proven my point. Things are not simply black and white. But I’m still struggling how to meaningfully express a way for us to once again attempt to unify, to find middle ground, and not to be led into a deeper path of disjointed hatred.
I read something today that captured my imagination and made me think about some of my own major life experiences.
As a first time young fireman, I put my own untrained volunteer firefighter’s life at complete risk by running directly into a burning house with nothing except my adrenaline to try to save two children who were supposedly on the second floor of that house. The kids had already gotten out, but the heat, the destruction and the force of that fire was unquestionable, and I was personally lucky to survive my passionate na茂vet茅.
As a young teacher, I saw the violent force of the Johnstown Flood of 1977. The damage, the lost lives, the broken families and the terror. The speed that it all happened made my respect for Mother Nature grow exponentially.
As James Taylor sang, “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain . . . But I always thought that I’d see you again.”
If fire is controlled and handled with respect, its power is not only awesome, it is also life-sustaining. From fire we get warmth, light and safety. The same is true of water in that it is life sustaining. Without it, we can’t survive. But when either isout of control, we can quickly be consumed. In fact, at Johnstown’s Old Stone Bridge during the Flood of 1889, we saw the destruction caused by both fire and rain.
On the other hand, fire can create the temperature necessary to heat water enough to make steam, and that steam can produce even more power. The power created from the combination of those two basic elements is not only awesome, it can be life enriching.
The formula becomes one of, once again, commingling the philosophy of both the Red and the Blue in a way that creates, not hot air, but life-enhancing power.
What will it take to close these gaping wounds that are separating families, neighbors and our country?
We all want peace, prosperity, health and some creature comforts, but none of that is possible if we are at philosophical war with each other, and this great democratic experiment will fall like the Berlin Wall, like the USSR, like the British and Roman Empires.
If you don’t think that would please Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and dozens of other competitors, you’re not intellectually participating in any real-life scenarios. Let’s try to find middle ground.
Nick Jacobs of Pittsburgh is a Senior Partner with Senior Management Resources and author of the blog healinghospitals.com.