Reuters recently polled more than three thousand Americans to see what they found to be most threatening to our nation.
Of course you had the typical and understandable terrorism concerns and rogue nation worries such as North Korea and Syria. You also had a lot of Republicans afraid of Democrats and Democrats afraid of Republicans, and President Obama got an ?honorable mention.
And then there was something I had never seen before. It might be the case that this question simply has never been asked, or maybe it’s just never been an important issue — either way, it shocked me.
According to the Reuters poll, 38 percent of Democrats and 42 percent of Republicans find their own party to be “something of a threat.”
So more than a third of people in both parties find the very party they belong to and support both politically and financially to be something of a threat. How can that be? I had to read and reread it to make sure I got it correct.
I was immediately reminded that fantasy, when realized, can sometimes be more nightmarish than dreamy. Our minds are much more powerful than our eyes, and how sad, at least to me, that this is happening in our civil ?society today.
Perhaps parties have become so ideological that what they end up being are mere fantasies rather than pragmatic representations of the public’s will. We don’t elect leaders; we elect storytellers and theorists and day dreamers who have begun to spin a web of reality for us that we don’t much want, or at least that we are scared to accept, as the polling data shows.
When our regrettably elected leaders build their societal dreams with other people’s futures, those dreams turn into nightmares — and it worries people.
I support the fracturing of our two entrenched political parties. I have never found the idea of having only two groups representing this nation to be particularly attractive. And to me, this threatening feeling many have with their party can be explained by this ?very fact.
Think about it. How would a group that has to encompass so many nuances of opinion function? By no other way than by creating a transcending ideology to form unity and cohesion within the group. And if there is anything we need less of in this world, it is ideology.
What we need is a balance of pragmatism and culture, of passion and compassion, from politicians that don’t build the grand dreams of their own but the future and society that so many of us desperately want.
Perhaps this generation can be the generation that crushes the hegemony of our two parties and creates a civil society in which active members aren’t afraid of the very groups to which they belong.
cgerst@indiana.edu
