My dad and I were reminiscing the other day about family friends from when I was young. It was interesting to hear, as an adult, my dad's description of some of them and compare it to my childhood impressions.
For some of them, particularly the ones I recall from when I was very young, my impressions seemed to settle into (unsurprisingly) some simplistic themes; one of my dad's friends from that time I recall as being very tall (dad said he was about 6'4", so not exactly NBA fodder), and another as 'really cool.' It was interesting to hear more details about their family and work lives from an adult perspective ('very tall' was a truck mechanic, and 'really cool' went on to be a successful computer programmer, for instance.)
When I asked my dad about what these folks' politics were, though, he thought for a long moment; "I really don't know. It never really came up back then; we were just friends."
That started us talking about just when someone's politics became so central to their identity, and when it became something that was discussed so relentlessly that it was almost impossible to know someone and NOT know their politics. Was it when the 24 hour news cycle made grinding political discussion into a fine powder every day the norm? Was it when Nixon blackened the eye of Republicans so severely? We didn't manage to pin down a cause, or even a a rough date that the change took place, and could only agree that it had.
Reflecting on that, I began to wonder; are we simply too mature a country to be so innocent about politics ever again? And is that maturity the type of maturity that gets you a discount on your auto insurance, or the kind that gets you put into a home with someone to make sure you eat your pudding?
Is it possible that in the nearly 250 years since our founding, we've managed to work through the peripheral issues of how to manage a country and dug down to the bedrock, fundamental questions of how we want to live? Is America in that stage of the final exam where, having answered all the questions we're sure about, we're now slowly working through the ones we're uncertain about, and spending time considering and weighing which answer is most likely correct? It seems to me that might be the case...
There aren't many issues more fundamental for government than protecting its citizenry from harm; government is, at its best, the oil in the gears of society, keeping the grinding and squeaking to a minimum, keeping friction from burning up the machine; a buffer between each of us and our neighbors who would harm us.
But what happens when we reach the point of having to decide which of us actually IS one of us; when we have to decide if a baby in a womb is the 'property' of the mother, to be disposed of at will, or an independent life, owed the protection of the state even against its own mother? We're down, with this one, to a core, fundamental question that can't, on this final exam, be left blank. Compromise between those who believe they are protecting a woman's fundamental right to control her own body (something which, in any other instance, is essentially as non-controversial as a political topic could be) and those who believe they are protecting an innocent child from murder seems impossible.
And that might be our issue, and eventually our undoing. As a society, we've solved many of the easy questions a country must face, and we're down to the real stumpers; the ones that seem a genuine toss-up, and which reading the textbook hasn't really provided an answer for.
There's a reason most citizen-centric governments don't last, and why Benjamin Franklin, asked what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had decided upon, answered "A Republic, if you can keep it." That reason may well be that there are questions that simply cannot be agreed up, and which, in a country where every citizen has the duty to participate in the decision-making process about how we structure our society, cannot ever be resolved. Our country could be confronting those fundamental, unsolvable problems now, and their debate could be one that continues until it creates a rift so deep, and so profound, that it forces us to choose sides again, just as we did 150 or so years ago.
If that is the case-and I think it might well be-we'll again have to decide if America stays together for the kids, separates and lives apart in reasonable amiability, or goes through a nasty, potentially bloody, divorce.
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