The Bully in Me, and in You

There’s a playgroup I’ve been a part of since my middle son was just about a year old. It started as a group of four or five families with kids right around the same age and has, in the four-plus years since, turned into gathering large enough to warrant an Excel spreadsheet of contacts and a lifesaving rep with monumental proportions.
With about a month left before the last presidential election, I was at playgroup at the house of a woman I’d grown close to over the last three-plus years. I’d shown up at her house when her dad passed away unexpectedly, and we’d shared a lot as our sons passed through toddlerhood together.
Launching into a discussion on the election, I’d made the automatic assumption that she, like me, was a Democrat. She’d shared enough about her past, her early adulthood, her life now that I obviously felt safe in the assumption, but she quickly steered me in the right direction. She was a registered Republican. She wasn’t sure what that meant anymore, but her parents had been staunch Regan Republicans and the identity had stuck.
What happened next was really kind of awesome: I had the best conversation since my college days about politics. She confessed to having downloaded the entire platform of both Obama and McCain and was diligently making her way through them in order to come up with an educated and informed vote. I vowed to her to do the same, and coming home from that playgroup got promptly on the internet to do just that. This was after a long, heartfelt conversation in which I was given the gift of really being asked to define, explain and justify my political position. I learned that I was not a knee-jerk Democrat, that I had been listening, that my passion for this new candidate came from a position of being informed and not just party-centric.
I credit my mother highly with this: in her house, we had dinner as a family and we each had to bring to the table current events. You had to have a news story of the day that you could summarize and explain why it mattered, and you had to understand it enough to explain it in detail. You also had to have a backup – with four kids, chances were excellent that someone would spill your chosen story before you got there and so you had to have a second story in your pocket in case this happened. I still read a few newspapers every day with that kind of negligible intensity – enough to make a few stories count but not enough time spent to make me really, truly informed (For that I depend on NPR).
What was really important about what I took from that playgroup was the eradication of the assumption that I could assume that because I liked someone or respected them as a parent or was comfortable in their house, that I could assume that I was politically aligned with them. What this took away from my assumed comfort zone first was the inane one-liners that give us that sense of clubbiness: the pot shots about a village in Texas missing their idiot or a instantaneous scoff at anything that came from Palin’s mouth. It made me a better Democrat.
What it also really made me aware of was the necessity for civility in how I chose to discuss politics even with those I considered close.
Lately, the issue of bullying has come front and center in our media. Thankfully. A problem of monumental proportions that defies politics, gender, race and religion (or perhaps, rather, it fails to exclude anyone based on these and many other factors), bullying is a new hot-button topic. Parents, school officials, community leaders claim uncertainty as to the origins of this growing problem.
To me, it’s obvious. The emergence of the tea party illuminates it more than ever: the way we identify politically is no longer civil. As a parent, married to an educator and involved intimately with how children learn and grow it is very clear to me that it’s all in the modeling. We learn how to behave, what is appropriate from our parents and, secondly, from our peers.
Never have I been so grateful to not have television at our house than this year., in this political season. The few times I was exposed to what is constantly broadcast in an election were the few (and I do mean few) hours a week I spent at the gym with seven televisions on full-time closed captioning blaring soundlessly and relentlessly with their constant political messages of hatred, lies and vitriol. It was nauseating. The political attack ads are unbearable in their acidity and rudeness. The one-liners from the parties on posters and especially on bumper stickers are cruel.
A parent with a “This is my peace sign” bumper sticker featuring a gun sight image wonders why his son is being called into the principal’s office for blatant disrespect of another student. This election I saw so many “I hate liberals”, “ I’ll keep my guns, money and freedoms, you can keep your ‘change’”, “NObama”, and so many stickers in that same vein it made me nauseous to drive down the road. I felt guilty for laughing at the “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing it’s idiot” stickers of the Bush era.
None of it is okay. If we’re going to have Democracy, let’s have it based on it’s own merits rather than this horrible bullying that’s going on. I’m disgusted on Facebook to see Michelle Obama referred to as Chewbaca and for the abject glee referenced at the introduction of new scandals on either side of the divide. Democrats are often ridiculed for passivity or for taking up a path of individualism but I applaud that after what I'm seeing this presidential go-around. Not that the Democrats aren't to blame as well. It's time each party started lauding its merits and accomplishments rather than the vicious lashing out at the other side.
A wonderful group called Sojourners has led a movement towards civility in politics that is astounding to me. Raised Catholic for a good part of my youth, I wouldn’t now consider myself a Christian, simply youth-educated in the teachings of Christianity. I signed up to receive e-mails from Sojourners because I wanted to be able to counter the radical religious right with this open-minded and loving Christian perspective on politics. I find it incredibly disturbing that religion has been co-opted by politics in this country and felt I needed to keep on my toes for the debate. I receive Sojourner’s daily “Verse and Voice” e-mail which offers a daily bible verse, and have been humbled and awed by their movement for Truth and Civility in politics (which of course necessitates an end to the disgusting and unbelievable legality of attack ads).
That simple message of truth and civility is one that, if heeded, brings an end to the scourge of bullying.
I believe there is bullying in religion: that the polarity in politics is seeping into so many churches and that for those who identify as Christian the pressure is on. A professed Christian friend who lives in Florida revealed that he's being constantly barraged with messages that Obama is a Muslim, that he doesn't have a birth certificate, that he's not a true Christian. Everything I learned in catechism points me away from this kind of vitriol and towards a belief in loving your neighbor and treating them as you'd like your children to be treated.
The message of truth and civility doesn’t require that we believe the same things or vote the same ways, but it necessitates that we allow the existence of one another, and acknowledge the pure and simple right to simply be and to believe.
The fear mongering – questioning our president’s citizenship, loyalty and even religion is dirty. We are teaching our children to discredit others based on their citizenship, religion, race, and politics. We are teaching that fear trumps truth. It’s not okay.
When the presidential election was happening, my husband and I taught our children in simple terms what it was about and why we were choosing to vote for Obama. We didn’t teach them to disparage McCain though they could root for Obama as loudly as they wanted. They know the Pledge of Allegiance and insist on singing It’s a Grand Old Flag every time they see an American flag flying. Patriotism is a part of who they are because of their parents’ dedication to the political process. We take them with us to vote. They fight over our “I Voted” stickers. They respect the role of the military in our country and speak proudly of the fact that their dad served as a Marine. They know we were against the war in Iraq and that we show gratitude towards every soldier we encounter and that the two are not in contrast, as the Marine and Obama stickers on my husband’s tailgate illustrate.
I don't think I'm alone in feeling personally attacked every time I see a bumper sticker that is insulting, that implies that Obama isn't patriotic or that it was a mistake to elect him (I really dislike that OOPS sticker in particular.The implication that what we did as a nation was akin to knocking over a glass of milk at the dinner table.)
I have huge gratitude for having had that conversation with my friend across the imagined political divide. Reading the statements of both Obama and McCain was necessary homework and reminded me that I can’t ever rest on my political laurels. I don’t know if my husband ever tires of hearing me talk back at the radio but he’d never try to quiet me. I get into political discussions on Facebook though I try not to, and my rule is always to model respect and civility, which to me leaves plenty of room for passion.
We are so divided politically, so entrenched and so impotent because of our rigidity. More importantly, we are less and less civil in our partisanship and we’re teaching our children to be less inclusive and more derogatory in their world. The results are showing up: for children and teens we call it bullying. For adults, we call it politics as usual. For all of us, we need to dedicate ourselves to making it right: Truth and Civility. I pledge my allegiance. Will you? Please?