Meeting the Enemy, Again

The memory is buried under layers, but sometimes it returns and when it does it is vivid.

Mid-1970’s. I was seven. A kid who rode my bus got on, bright blood on his clothing. “She stabbed her,” he said, yelling more than speaking, but to no one in particular. I looked to just outside the bus window where a crowd of kids swarmed around the high school parking lot like agitated bees. I could not see the student who’d been stabbed, could not see the blood that was flowing from the wound, could not see the teenager in what would be the final desperate minutes of her life. For that I am grateful. May she rest in peace.

The individual snapshots of this memory are vivid, but so is my memory of the fear; it was present enough to feel like a physical thing that day. I was suddenly immersed in fear, and it covered me and everyone around me. When violence ruptures the membrane that protects us, fear drives the mind and the chemicals released mindlessly drive the body: to flee, to freeze, to fight. I remember the teenagers running around outside the bus, jerky motions, purposeless movements, running from or running to, driven by fear, by trauma, by violence.

Today, October 14, 2021. This memory returned to me today, unbidden, as I began to reflect again on the violence and fear we live with in this country as we continue to rupture the membranes that protect us. Earlier this week a woman on the news called for a second Civil War in the United States because “they can’t take it anymore,” the it being the politics of the other American political party. I’d like to write this woman off as some kind of outlier to the norm, but this rhetoric is becoming the norm. I’d like to write this woman off as ignorant, a simpleton who does not understand that the first Civil War in this country killed as many as 750,000 people, back when the most popular gun shot three rounds per minute, and now there are up to 10 million guns in circulation that shoot up to 400 rounds per minute, there are groups already organized into militias and paramilitary groups, who’ve practiced war tactics and built explosives, who’ve actively prepped by storing the food and gasoline and only want a match. But increasingly there is an active movement against knowledge, against science and history and scholarship, a movement that is markedly pro-ignorance, with ignorance seeming to be the point and simpletons the result. I cannot write this woman off.

Susan Benesch is a scholar I admire and one of the leading experts in the world on how speech becomes violence. She has spent her life in countries across the world analyzing social unrest and political violence, specifically looking at how the language of violence escalates in a society until the conditions are ripe and actual violence begins. I first heard her speak in 2013 after she had done a project studying the transfer of presidential power in Nigeria, a hallmark election that year for democracy in Nigeria thanks to a peaceful transfer of power, only two years after nearly 1000 people were killed in politically-motivated violence. A comment Benesch made when I heard her speak in 2013 really stood out to me. She told us that for her entire career she had to leave the United States to do her work, but for the first time she knew her work would now begin to include a study of the increasingly violent rhetoric of politics in the United States.

ACLED Map of Armed Demonstrations in past 18 months.

Currently a visitor to Benesch’s Dangerous Speech Project website (dangerousspeech.org) can find reference to a 2020 report that cites the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which collects real-time data on political demonstrations and violence in 150 countries. It identifies the U.S. as one of “10 conflicts to worry about…”, and a map of the United States based on a report by ACLED shows in the last 18 months there have been 560 armed demonstrations, 97% of which have taken place in public spaces. 54% of those demonstrations have included militia groups and militant social movements like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. We are a country to worry about: ignorance, fear, violent rhetoric all on the rise, and people are showing up with their guns to make a statement. Even people elected to the highest offices in the land are using the threat of political violence as part of their political appeal. Towards whom are those guns pointed?

The dangerous speech of a recent political ad.

1974. The three-volume Gulag Archipelago was published in English. Written by Aleksander Solzenhitsyn between 1958-68, it is a collection of writings and interviews about the Soviet prison system, but as much as anything it is a treatise on human behavior. Solzenhitsyn writes about how otherwise ordinary people can be turned into bystanders, or into worse: masochists, torturers, murderers. He writes “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” History is full of examples, as enormous as genocide and as small and local as the parking lot just outside my bus that day so many years ago, or the jealous man who shot another man to death in the driveway across the street from my home three years ago with his two teenage children watching. The evil is not out there, far away. It is as close as our own hearts, a whisker-thin line between safety and danger. And I’m afraid the line is moving.

January 6, 2021. An armed mob stormed the United States Capitol on the day and at the very time the 2020 United States Presidential Election was being certified by Congress, overseen by the Vice President. That is incontrovertible. At the Capitol there were thousands of individuals acts of physical violence, destruction of property, and other criminal activity, driven on by mob mentality. That is incontrovertible. People died during the violence and after. That is incontrovertible. United States elected representatives had to be rushed out of the building for their own safety. That is incontrovertible. As of this writing, 674 United States citizens have been arrested for crimes committed on this day while law enforcement officials continue to search for more. That is incontrovertible.

Enter the politics of our times and the spin machinery of our modern media, the deep political divisions, the mistrust, distrust, and animosity of political difference, the talking heads, the propaganda, the willful ignorance and outright denial of what we saw with our own eyes. Enter controversy, disagreement, dissembling, and the Big Lie. The events of January 6 are being investigated by law enforcement, by the Department of Justice, and by Congressional committee, but it is being stonewalled by the new normal of dangerous politics. We can’t even set our division aside to understand and address the real crime, real violence, and a real attack on the institutions and processes of Democracy of January 6: not the thin membrane that protects us, but the very foundations of the rule of law.

November, 1989. When sledgehammers started knocking holes in the Berlin Wall, the specter of the Cold War and the threat of the Soviet Union began to teeter as well. Ordinary people knocked down the concrete wall that had been nearly impossible to pass for a generation. Then the iron curtain of the USSR would fall about a year later. I had lived all of my twenty years up to that point aware that the USSR had a nuclear arsenal that would combine with the United States arsenal to destroy the entire world sixteen times over. But suddenly, and for the next fifteen years or more, the United States didn’t have an enemy to rally against that would fill the void created by the end of the Cold War. The opportunity for peace was at hand because the walls and curtains that separated us from that peace had fallen.

The Berlin Wall: A Generation of Division

But American politics of strength required an enemy to feed the military-industrial complex, the heart of our economy since the 1940’s, and arguably the most important contrast between our political parties. If your political message is that you are the party that protects life as we know it in the United States, you need an enemy who is threatening that way of life. Global terrorism would provide an enemy in 2001, but before the attack on the Twin Towers, the political machinery was busy creating a new enemy, and this one was already inside the United States: the other political party. 

In the lead up to the 2000 Presidential Election, new reasons for political divisions were created, and they were deepened around issues of faith and the American culture wars. Now, instead of being the necessary counterpart of a systems of checks and balances, the other political party was a threat: collection of boogeymen threatening to snuff out an entire way of life. Twenty years later the enemy to fear and loathe is the Democrat down the block, the Republican who fixes your car, the teacher who pushes socialism, or the police officer who makes a life or death decision in space of a heartbeat, the politician from Detroit who wants to provide free healthcare (that socialist!), or the politician from Kent County who wants to tighten border security (that fascist!).

When we met our new enemy, it turned out we knew them all along.

Early 1970’s. Cartoonist Walt Kelly drew his comic-strip character Pogo for an Earth Day strip, the namesake opossum sitting in the woods, staring at a landscape covered with trash. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” Pogo says.

Pogo was right then, and right now his fifty-year old wisdom is once again our warning. The enemy is us, but not the person who lives next door or sends her kids to the same school or shops at the same grocery store. The enemy is the us inside: that fearful, manipulated part of you that would cross the line in your own heart that divides good from evil. If you love what’s good and would protect it, you must guard the line in your own heart from indifference, from being fooled into thinking your neighbor or fellow American is the enemy, from all of the forces that divide us, before that thin line becomes a concrete wall, impossible to cross for generations.

September 11, 2021. As the twentieth anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers approached, I largely ignored the documentaries and retrospectives on the day. That day remains a trauma, and I was not interested in reliving it. But on September 11 I did end up pulling up a short video on YouTube about the boat rescue in Lower Manhattan I’d watched a million times before, but not for years. That was the story I was drawn to that day, and it moved me to tears, as I watched again the story of the day when more than 500,000 people were evacuated from the areas of Manhattan near the Twin Towers by boats of all shapes and sizes, most of them piloted by the ordinary men and women who work or live around the New York harbors and rivers. I love that story, and if you don’t know it, watch it, learn about it, and you’ll love it, too. People were moved in their hearts to goodness and service for their fellow Americans, their fellow humans in need. It is the best of us, and the best of the US. That day, when we met our saviors, it was us.

September 11, 2001 Boat Rescue

Saturday. My older brother and I drove two hours to Tinley Park, a suburb south of Chicago, to meet our younger brother for a long-awaited event. Together we were going to see the rock group Kiss, the musical and cultural staple for all of us growing up in our wood-paneled basement in Benton Harbor, Michigan in the 1970’s. My older brother was the leader when it came to the records we would listen to, and we listened to Kiss. In all of our memories, it is the soundtrack of the childhood we spent together.

I’ve written many times about how my brother and I are on the opposite sides of the political aisle, and we have disagreed about politics our entire adult lives. It has become harder to talk to him about politics in the last few years, even though I have always loved talking to him about politics. But it’s hard right now. Still, when you’re in a car for two hours, it’s going to come up. We talked with some elevated disagreement about the extremes of his party and the extremes of my party, but then he said something hopeful, and we agreed, beautifully, and got back to talking about rock music. He said if we’re going to be able to put down the literal and figurative weapons we have pointed at each other across the political aisle, if we’re going to back away from the abyss in front of all of us, “it has to be the reasonable people in both parties that lead us in doing that.” That’s the kind of thing my brother says from time to time, this guy who thinks and votes differently than me, but is still his brother’s keeper. We agreed that there are more reasonable people in this country who just need to get up on their feet and join the effort of good will, rejecting the fear and division, actively working to prevent the violence. The line between good and evil is the line between us and them. It is whisker thin. Still, sometimes it feels like we're just hanging on by a thread.

A few hours later we were singing and dancing with 20,000 other Americans of all shapes and sizes. Some in costume. Some in face paint. Some wearing political shirts or hats. Some showing off their wealth. Some letting their freak flags fly. But for a few hours we created a living space together, our voices blending together to sing songs like Doctor Love and Love Gun and I Was Made for Loving You, songs I’ve known by heart for almost fifty years. Songs we all knew by heart, so much more powerful for being sung in unison.

October 16, 2021: An Arena of Brotherly Love

The history of violence of this country is both uniquely personal and collectively shared. The future of violence is already being shaped, but so is every other alternative to it. The lines already cross our hearts: Good. Evil. Enemy. Savior. Neighbor. Brother. A divided country. A country to worry about. Our entire lives have brought us to these moments, the abyss is before our feet, the moment is vivid and the fear is real. Reasonable people surround us. We have choices to make about what happens next.