In this lifestyle enclave, OPRFFP, when residents celebrate diversity, the diversity they affirm tends to be racial. Racial diversity, however, is not in my opinion the number one challenge in our society anymore.
In 1992 Rodney King famously asked, “Can’t we all just get along?”
In 2012, Jonathan Haidt wrote in his book The Righteous Mind, “Nowdays [sic] most Americans are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines.”
Two weeks ago, Haidt’s assertion was on my mind when I attended a presentation at Dominican University titled, “Two Dads Defending Democracy Tour,” with the subtitle “Bridging the Gap During Divisive Times.”
The premise for their onstage conversation was that, these days, ideological diversity is more of a challenge than a blessing.
The two dads are quite different in terms of their ideology. Fred Guttenberg is an ardent gun control advocate, while Joe Walsh is a member of the Tea Party and a firm supporter of gun owners’ rights.
The website Paideia stated, “Through respect and understanding, Walsh and Guttenberg successfully model how to engage in dialogue with a willingness to listen and learn to find common ground.”
At the Dominican event the two said they fight like cats and dogs (my metaphor) but they also respect each other and seek common ground. The image that came to my mind as I listened to them was pro football players from the two opposing teams gathering at midfield after the game to greet each other.
For the two dads the essential requirement for bridging seemed to be respect.
Two days later, I attended an Orthodox Jewish wedding in Skokie, to which I had been invited by Chabad Rabbi Yitzchok Bergstein. At that wedding uniformity ruled.
Almost all of the men wore long beards, black fedora hats, white shirts and black suits with Tzitzit fringes hanging out beneath the hem of their suit coats.
No bridges were needed at the event attended by 350 people. They didn’t tell me if they argued among themselves about politics — in the U.S. or in the Holy Land — but at the wedding they were all birds of a feather flocking together, and I kind of envied them. The best metaphor I can think of is that they were all “at home.”
They occupied a cultural space in which they all knew the prayers in Hebrew, they all ate kosher food, and you should have seen them dance! I described it to my friends as “athletic” dancing. One musician playing a keyboard somehow was able to sound like a whole klezmer band. The music seemed to get louder and faster as the evening progressed and what appeared to me as exultant joy spread across the faces of the dancers.
From the beginning of the event, men stayed on the south side of the building and the women on the north side. The two genders sat on opposite sides during the wedding ceremony held under a canopy outdoors. A wall divided men from women during the meal, and men danced with men after that.
I realized that Jews have a long history of coping with diversity, of being a minority group in the midst of a dominant cultural and political majority. The metaphor of “home” kept coming to mind in the days following those two experiences.
A young man who had years before been a student in my confirmation class explained to me that growing up in a homogeneous small town in Minnesota, where most of the residents traced their lineage back to Norway, Sweden or Finland, created a strong foundation for his identity as an adult.
He worked for the Alaska Dept. of Education and a big part of his job description included working with indigenous people, often living in small towns with their racial/ethnic kinfolks. Growing up in the uniformity of a small town near Duluth where most of the residents were baptized in the Lutheran church, he recalled, had the effect of creating a strong foundational identity, which he believed enabled him to be comfortable in bridging to difference, a challenge that Guttenberg and Walsh were trying to navigate by way of respect.
Erik Erikson claims that Stage Five in our psychosocial development is Identity vs. Role Confusion. According to the website Simply Psychology, “Success in this stage will lead to the virtue of fidelity. Fidelity involves being able to commit one’s self to others on the basis of accepting others, even when there may be ideological differences.”
They say that Sunday (and Shabat) morning is the most segregated hour of the week in our country. Maybe that is a good thing. Maybe if we all had a safe, secure spiritual home to go to at the end of the day/week we’d be more willing and able to build those bridges that Walsh and Guttenberg are encouraging us to create — more willing and able to respect those who think differently about the nature of reality than we do.
