We Are Not Hopelessly Divided

There are powerful forces out there looking to divide us, and they have been variously successful. But we don’t have to let them win.

I really wanted to kick Mike out of camp.

He had grown up in a trailer not far away, in rural southern New Jersey, which is far more rural and southern than you might think. He was tall and lanky and spoke with a drawl and walked with a chip on his shoulder. His large and intimidating father ran a local plastics company and listened to Rush Limbaugh every day. Before dad left on check-in day, he sidled up to me and confided: “Now I know this is an arts camp, and there are a lot of those kinds of kids here. But I told Mike, just remember, you know how to fight.”

And fight he did. He quickly got homesick, and he dealt with it the only way he knew how. Friendly-seeming pillow fights quickly grew unfriendly. Yelling matches erupted between him and Philip and Kareem, two Black kids in the bunk from Newark; a third, Christopher, stayed quiet and talked with his fists. Over and over again Mike would come up to me crying, complaining that Juan, sitting and knitting on his bed in well-tailored pink pants, was “looking at him funny.” (I assured Juan I believed him when he insisted he was doing no such thing.)

Then one night Mike started a fight and got hit so hard he chipped a tooth. My co-counselor had the night off. The bunk was in an uproar. And I walked out.

I went and sat in a field in the dark, overwhelmed, feeling terrible for myself. I shouldn’t have to deal with all this. It’s not fair. He shouldn’t be here. He’s being racist and homophobic. He’s making other kids unsafe. He needs to go.

That’s where Jeremy found me. He ambled up to me in the field, looking past me with a distant gaze that came from being (as he put it) “not not blind.” Jeremy and I had met when I was twelve and he was sixteen, and he taught me how to play the cello. Now, twelve years later, he was teaching me to be a counselor.

You need to go back to your bunk, he told me. No, Mike is not getting kicked out. He needs you. All your kids need you.

I went back, resentfully. I was stuck living with Mike for the next three weeks. Seeing no other option, I did my best to love him. I made myself stop avoiding him. I made it a point to talk with him every day, about something, anything. We both liked music—he had come on a scholarship to play rock guitar, and I was a classical choral singer. Not much, but it was something we both cared about. Of course we both cared about politics, too, which felt like a dangerous topic to broach. But slowly we started talking about it. I strained to understand where he was coming from, and to share where I was coming from in a way that might make sense to him. 

He still got into fights. But they happened a little less often, and they stopped a little quicker. Everyone in the bunk started opening up a little more and feeling a little safer around each other. On the last night of camp, Mike came and sat on my bed for a while after lights out. He started crying, not because he was homesick but because he had to leave. The next morning, when his parents came to pick him up, he bounded up to me, beaming, his application for next year already filled out.

He came back the next year, the second of his three-year scholarship, and got kicked out for fighting. Progress is rarely linear.

But when he returned for his third and final year, something had changed. He seemed newly self-possessed and self-reflective. So at the beginning of the summer I let him in on a little in-joke. During staff training we all had been given a little trading card with four photos of kids on it, each next to one of the camp’s “core values”: Safety, Fun, Community, and Personal Growth. I showed Mike the card—and he laughed as much as we had, seeing his face next to the word “safety”! Then I told him: If you don’t get into any fights all summer, that card is yours.

That was twelve years ago. I last saw Mike last month, when he and his father came to visit me in South Philadelphia. The safety card was still in his wallet.

In some ways he has changed. He has taken up RPGs and drinks tea avidly. His politics have swung significantly leftward, to his father’s goodhearted chagrin. When we sat together in my sukkah last month, they each threw their respective talking points at the other as I sat between them and did my best to explain to each the logic of the other’s position; our two-hour Socratic session was interrupted only when his father checked his phone from time to time to offer updates from the Phillies game.

Yet in the most basic ways, Mike has not changed. He is the same quirky, awkward, slightly antisocial, and deeply loving human being that I met back in 2008. I made myself love him then. I still love him now.

Being Mike’s bunk counselor was among my first experiences of what one might call “working across divides.” Of course neither Mike nor I would have ever called it that; more on that subject in a future post.

In the years since I’ve learned a lot more about critical pedagogy, community organizing, cross-conflict dialogue facilitation, and other related crafts. I’ve chaired a Lutheran faith community in St. Paul (like a good Jew). I’ve organized a community network that built the largest non-industrial solar energy project in Kentucky coal country. I’ve cofounded a cross-partisan dialogue exchange between east Kentucky and Western Massachusetts, as well as long-term collaborations between people in the Appalachian coalfields, the Black Belt of Alabama, the Rust Belt of Wisconsin, and the inner city of West Baltimore.

Yet looking back at when I met Mike, I do feel a certain sense of Everything I Needed To Know—about how to connect with unexpected allies and work together toward something that might look like democracy—I Learned At Summer Camp. Here are a few of those lessons.

1. We Are Not Hopelessly Divided

I can tell you lots more stories. I can tell you about the conservative Catholic anti-vaxxer I work with closely in Connecticut, who is organizing alongside working-class Dominican neighbors for affordable housing. I can tell you about the lifelong Black organizer in West Baltimore who works closely with rural Trump voters and is open, in ways I still struggle with, to the idea that the Confederate flag may in fact be a symbol of cultural heritage. I can tell you about the Kentucky strip mine boss who makes common cause with anarchists to demand that gas companies pay their fair share to the people whose land they profit off.

From a pundit’s eye view, these kinds of stories feel impossible, even incomprehensible. From the commanding heights of the academy, the foundation, and the social media feed, it appears we are hopelessly divided, irrevocably riven by evils like “tribalism” and “toxic polarization.” (Terms I have never heard cross the lips of any of the people I’ve just told you about.)

Yet I have been an eyewitness to the opposite. Not just once, but again and again, in places all over the country, for more than a decade. And those experiences have instilled in me a basic article of faith: However foreign or threatening or evil a person or organization or community might seem, one way or another we will find a way to connect and collaborate.

This does not mean evil does not exist. It just means that no person, community, or organization is purely evil. (Or purely good.) Following in the tradition of the folklorist Alan Lomax, I have found good reason to believe in the “inherent genius and viability of every cultural community.” The trick is to find that genius, that seed of homegrown democratic values, and help it grow.

There are powerful forces out there looking to divide us, and they have been variously successful. But we don’t have to let them win. I have stopped saying “we are divided” and started saying instead “we have been divided.” Divided is not our natural state. Someone has done this to us—someone who does not wish us well.

2. Love People, All People, As Best We Can

Did Mike deserve to get kicked out of camp that first summer? Honestly, he probably did. It is not at all clear to me that keeping him at camp was the right call, given the clear and present danger he posed to his bunkmates.

But that was not my call to make. I was a bunk counselor, not the camp director. And most of us, most of the time, are in the same position I was. We don’t actually have the power to kick anyone out, as much as we may think they deserve it.

That point was driven home at a Western Massachusetts community singing I attended a couple years ago. Someone led a song that goes:

When the storm clouds roll on in 
You know there’ll be a great big storm. 
I’m ready to release, receive 
And let the rain wash my troubles away.

It’s what’s known as a “zipper song,” meaning we sing it a bunch of times and each time a singer replaces some specified words — in this case, “my troubles” — with something relevant to them. That day, in the verses that followed, “my troubles” got replaced with “Trump,” “racism,” “hatred,” and so on. (I offered “McConnell,” which I thought was clever because it scans the same as “my troubles,” and also I despise Mitch McConnell.) But then one of the singers protested, only half jokingly: If the rain washes all of those people and things away, then they’ll be in the groundwater!

Indeed they will. Like Mike, they will still be with us, whether we want them to be or not. And we had better do our best to love them.

What we do instead, too often, is dehumanize them. When we declare we will no longer interact with “racists” and “Trump voters,” when we reduce people to nothing more than a harmful statement or action, gone are their families, their struggles, their loves and passions, their humor, their complexity, their humanity. Gone are our neighbors.

But we can’t actually wash them away or kick them out of camp. We can only kick them out of our lives — and right into the hands of the hatemongers, who will welcome them with all the love and affirmation that we have high-mindedly refused.

None of this means we can’t have feelings about people’s actions. I certainly do, and I have been known to share those feelings. It just means drawing a line between criticizing people’s actions and reducing people to nothing more than those actions, and then dismissing those people entirely.

This is what the Black Freedom Movement called “nonviolence,” and what conservative Christians call “hating the sin and loving the sinner.” Or in the words that once stood on a sign outside the Freewill Baptist Church in Payne Gap, Kentucky:

Love everyone. I’ll sort ‘em out later.
—God

3. Don’t Bullshit About Our Differences.

Some of us, feeling frustrated at the fatalists who pronounce us hopelessly divided, have taken refuge in the equally and oppositely unhelpful declaration: “We’re all really the same!”

No we’re not. And there’s no need to pretend. Mike had no illusions about me, nor I about him. It was through taking our differences seriously that we learned to live together. By the end of that first summer he knew he could say “Bush,” and I would respond “sucks,” and we would both laugh.

When I’m organizing in rural Southern places and I meet someone new, I’ll often slip in a reference to myself as a “communist Jew from the Northeast.” Usually there’s a half-second awkward pause, then the person laughs. Then we laugh together. Then we can talk about anything. Not because we are the same, but because we’re different and we know it. And now we have found at least one thing we actually have in common: the ability, and desire, to laugh about it a little.

Technically I’m a left-leaning populist, not a communist; more on that another day. But it gets the point across. We both know there’s a lot we disagree on. We’ve both been taught to see each other as the enemy, and we might a little bit believe it. But I’m not going to let all of that get in the way of getting to know you and work with you as a full person. And I hope you’ll extend that same grace to me.

4. Start From What We Have In Common.

We don’t want to bullshit about our differences, yes. But there is also a universal truth that too often evades people “working across divides”: No two human beings on God’s green earth ever started a relationship based on what they did not have in common.

It often starts with culture: stories, songs, plays, movies, memes. Some of my closest people in Kentucky said I became real to them — a person and a neighbor, not just a nonprofit professional who came there on a grant — when they heard me at community gatherings singing some of their favorite Old Regular Baptist hymns. Mike and I didn’t share much, but we both liked music.

When I started working with a homeless-housed theater company in Minneapolis, I wasn’t sure how to relate to my homeless ensemble-mates. (They generally called themselves “homeless,” not “unhoused” or any of the other en vogue professionalisms.) Surely their life experiences were irreconcilably different from my own. Then I learned that one of them was raised much wealthier than I was. And another used to live in Chicago, like me, and we loved some of the same musicals.

Slowly I let myself open up to them, to let them see me as more than the embodiment of “professional-class help-giver,” just as I learned to see them as more than the embodiment of “needy poor person.” That slow process of humanization, and trust, is an essential part of the work we have to do. We will likely find something in common with anyone we are looking to relate to — as soon as we are ready to see them, and ourselves, as full poeople, not as the dehumanized embodiment of abstractions.

5. Make Things Together, and Own What We Make

I coined the phrase “we own what we make” while working alongside former coal miners and their families, people who decidedly did not own what they made and were committed to changing that. It has been taken up by several organizations I’ve worked with, including the Letcher County Culture Hub in Kentucky, the feminist community printshop Studio Two Three in Virginia, the community action agency TEAM, Inc. in Connecticut, and the national Performing Our Future coalition.

Making things together, and owning what we make, is at the core of building democracy at the community level. We share our individual stories and recognize how much of our story is shared. We create value together out of that shared story, in all kinds of ways. And we build the power to keep that value, against the plutocrats and other plunderers who would take it from us. This is true in communities everywhere. There is a reason unions and grassroots cultural organizations have been such crucial vehicles for building solidarity across lines of race, class, religion, and region—and why those devoted to divide-and-conquer have invested so much in busting and defunding them. (More on this another day.)

Growing up in the segregated suburbs, and then into higher education, I had always been taught to understand myself as “privileged,” versus others who were “oppressed” or “underprivileged.” But how deep was this divide? As I worked with my fellow actors who were living on the streets in Minneapolis, I learned they were chiefly concerned about getting a decent place to live, health care, and education, and finding work that offered some kind of fulfillment. What was I concerned about, a grad student in my twenties? What was Mike’s family concerned about, living in a trailer in south Jersey? Pretty much the same things.

What were the Koch Brothers concerned about? Very different things.

Like most of our neighbors — dare I say 99 percent of them — what we all wanted was what the late nineteenth-century Populists would have called the “cooperative commonwealth.” We make value together, we distribute it together, and we see there’s enough for all of us. The fact that you get more doesn’t mean I have to get less. The fact that you come to matter more doesn’t mean I have to matter less. And vice-versa.

Charles Koch, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the rest of their small-but-powerful ilk are after something very different. They don’t want to help create the cooperative commonwealth, but to plunder it.

In that difference may lie the most important unity of all.