Discourse with the Enemy

How do you communicate effectively with other people who have opposite political and religious views from us? This is seemingly more difficult to do than it was ten years ago....or even five years ago. No matter the topic of discussion, a chasm emerges. My students are largely conservative and I am not. I don't really care about that....I do want them to be able to see all sides of the argument, however. It is tough for a teacher to even accomplish this in the current climate. Bill O'Reilly and others seem to be forcing people to pick a side....you are either with us 100% or you're against us. This was not the attitude on which America was constructed. America's basic foundations was established as a challenge to authority be it Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, or Luke Skywalker. But this seems to have been hijacked and now a good American must tip his cap and keep silent. When did America become the evil empire? When did America embrace the dark side of the force?

The ramifications of this are startling. Of course, this has all been connected to the current mid-term elections but it seems that everyone has finally noticed that just how much the emotions of the dark side of the force has turned us away from rational thought. Politicians on both sides, but many more on the Republican side, are beyond corruption, they are criminal. House majority leaders are resigning, Senate majority leaders are investigated, senators are enticing minors to have sex with them and the president of the national evangelical association resigns due to accusations that he paid for gay sex with a prostitute and paid for drugs. Come on, how far down the rabbit hole do we have to go before we realize that wonderland is not very wonderful? It seems that in a postmodern world, America has lost its way. The poet Robert Lowell noticed this back in the 1960s. His poem of "For the Union Dead" suggested that America had betrayed its original existence and gave into the values of the marketplace and a lost morality. No man like Colonol Robert Gould Shaw exists anymore. "He is out of bounds now. He rejouices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die." Is America dying? It seems to me that it is. The beginning of the end was Vietnam. The neo-cons and the Bushies are the last remaining bulwark in the retreat from empire. Iraq/Afghanistan is the attempt by the neo-cons to turn Vietnam into a "do-over." But it is too late. The fact that conservatives own the government is evidence of the American slide from power. People are panicking. When people panic, they turn to someone who they think they can lead them down the path not realizing that they have chozen a government who is just as blind as everyone else. How does one tell everyone in the stairwell of a burning building to be calm? How does one communicate across the chasm of political discourse, that we are all in it together and that the ambiguity of postmodernism is not something to be feared but an opportunity to return the nation to the true meaning of its creed? Where is the next Walt Whitman? Where is the next Bobby Kennedy? Where is the next Colonol Shaw? What is America about--expanding the empire or holding true to the union dead who fought that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth? There must be a way to communicate this message across the chasm of poltical discourse. How?