A few years ago I visited Berlin for a business meeting. First time to the city.
I grew up during the Cold War, which was always threatening to heat up. We hunkered under our wooden school desks to prepare for the blast wave of a thermonuclear attack. Even at the age of 10, I recognized the lunacy of that act.
Over five decades later, I found myself wandering the streets of the city that epitomized the degree of divisiveness in the world at that time. A city, and a whole country, cut in half. The west represented the democratic allies from World War II, and the east represented the communist countries forming what was known as the Soviet Bloc.
These two ideologies were mutually exclusive, alternate forms of government founded on alternate views of reality. Like matter and antimatter, when they might come into contact they would annihilate each other. Or threaten to.
In the middle of Berlin, there is a stone line that marks the old location of the Berlin Wall, which separated the two incompatible ways of life. Along parts of that line, remnants of the actual wall have been preserved. The transition point, Checkpoint Charlie, remains as well, with mannequins dressed as Cold War-era soldiers.
The checkpoint seemed more like a tourist curiosity than a wormhole between two universes. The wall looked feeble, crumbling and ineffective in its role. But knowing the history of this place, I saw each as a headstone for the deaths of so many people who tried to cross the chasm.
And now I find my world becoming similarly divisive. But this time, it’s not one country’s form of government against another. It isn’t a world carved up between communism and democracy. It’s my own country being segregated between…what? I don’t even know.
The news tries to draw correlations between each side and their motives. But when I look more at the behavioral evidence, my conclusion is that each side is acting out of fear or greed or both, without clear reasons, at least not to me.
I remember sitting around a table at a restaurant in 2016 with four other board members of a company. I considered each of them to be smart, hard-working, accomplished colleagues with whom I had done some difficult work. I respected them. When each of them in turn described their choice for our President, I was stunned. They turned to me for my opinion. I blurted out, “He scares the shit out of me!”
That hasn’t changed. It’s gotten worse. But it’s not Trump that I’m really afraid of. It’s what his election means about the true nature of our country right now. We are not a common citizenry who have passionate disagreements but join together for the sake of the whole. Maybe we haven’t been that since World War II, at least to the same degree. We did come together after the World Trade Center attack. Other nations’ leaders said, “Now, we are all Americans”. That lasted a short while.
Then we squandered that golden moment of cohesion. Our then-President soon said, “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists”, thereby putting a stiff wall up and forcing people to now choose which side to stand on. Over time, more walls have been constructed. Trump wants to build a bigger, better wall everywhere, both in physical form, but also in other ways, such as trade barriers, policy moats, distancing our historical allies, segregating “good” media from “bad”, claiming hidden conspiracies, and the list goes on.
In all of this divisiveness, there is no place for truth-seeking. That would create a bond between opposing camps. Such an act would be an admission that each side might be right about some things, but also wrong about some things, which is not the way you gain supporters. There is only a choice. Whose side are you on?
The fear-mongering of both Republicans and Democrats is equal in intensity and urgency. The countless emails from both parties claim, “We don’t want money, we just want to know what you think”, but they are always concluded by a plea for donations. And the inference is that if the money doesn’t flow to their causes, we will be well and truly screwed.
What can anyone do to stop the avalanche of fearful rock that will fall into a perfectly reconstructed, current version of the Berlin Wall?
Maybe nothing will stop it. But we can choose how we individually act in our daily relationships. My choice is to get closer to people who don’t think the way I do, who don’t vote for the people I do, who don’t agree with me on “what should be”. I find that through non-judgmental inquisitiveness, I learn more about why they think and feel the way they do, even if I don’t agree with what they think and feel.
And the “why” that always comes out is exactly the same “why” that I have underpinning my own thinking and feeling.
The vast majority of us just want to take care of ourselves, our families and friends. We want to have a life that is improving, to be at peace, to enjoy the simple pleasures, to create positive lasting memories. All around the world, this is what I’ve discovered in my travels.
So go towards that wall when you see it, when you hear it, when you feel it. Get close, really close. Reach over it with curiosity and compassion. That’s what I’m telling myself to do. It feels a lot better than adding stones.