Henrietta Hay's Column

Some friends and I were sitting around one afternoon drinking coffee and talking about the recent forum, American Voices. I commented that I wanted to write about it but hadn't figured out how to handle it. One woman said, "Write about what it made you feel." Hmmmm. What it made me feel was both hopeful and troubled.

The focus of the forum was building community. In order to do that it is necessary to address what the speakers called, "the middle voice," the political center. Now mine is not usually one of the middle voices. I am often at one end or the other, taking a stand. The speakers, however, were deeply committed people who did not consider "the middle" to be an amorphous lump, but rather an active, vital part of the body politic. Judge English believes that it consists of almost all of us, excepting the kooks on each end, who cannot be reached by any kind of reason. True community can be achieved only by people who are willing not only to defend their beliefs, but also to listen and try to understand the opposition. It takes a person with strong principles to be able to find the middle. That was the hopeful part.

Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, sees no middle ground. He mused, "I need some help with my homework assignment, Hobbes. I'm supposed to write a paper that presents both sides of an issue and then defends one of the arguments." "What's your issue?" asks Hobbes. "That's the problem. I can't think of anything to argue. I'm always right and everybody else is always wrong. What's to argue about?" That's the attitude that makes community very difficult to achieve. That was the troubling part.

"A community is more than a place on the map. It is a state of mind, a shared vision, and a common fate. We can no longer take community for granted in the United States. We have too much evidence that it is unraveling. Building communities becomes highly important public policy and imperative to our public and private futures. Community is not a guarantee, but a continuing challenge." This was part of the message from Dick and Dottie Lamm at the forum.

We have become so polarized on issues that we are threatening the very system that gives us the right to have those beliefs. The main social chasms in our society today are mostly results of the conflicts between church and state, between religion and politics--abortion, homosexuality, creationism, and racism. The main attempts at censorship nationally have to do with homosexuality, witchcraft and anything else to do with sex.

The biggest challenge for tolerant people and "communitarians" is to try to find some sort of common ground on which to discourse with "the other side." As one of my friends said, "You need two sides to define the middle. We have to learn to think in different terms."

Many years ago when I was somewhat more idealistic than I am now and thought everything was black and white, I was shocked to read in John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, "It is compromise that prevents each set of reformers from crushing the group on the extreme opposite end of the political spectrum. The legislator...knows that there are few if any issues where all the truth and all the right and all the angels are on one side." It could have been written yesterday.

Judith Krug, speaking at the forum, emphasized the need for wide access to knowledge in building community. She said that without libraries we cannot continue to function as a free society. She quoted James Madison, who wrote 150 years ago, "A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

As a nation we survived putting a constitution together, the Civil War, Joe McCarthy and Vietnam. I expect that we can survive the social battles today. But we're all going to have to work at it. There are too many American voices like Calvin's.