Like many Americans, the election of 2012 has left me exhausted.  The constant ideological pounding by both parties has assaulted my consciousness like a continual mantra of trouble, hate and blame.   In my home state, it remained to be seen, until last night, if a man so bereft of common sense, a man who honestly believes that God prevents women from getting pregnant in the case of “legitimate rape”, would actually represent me and my family in the United States Senate.  As my wife and I arrived at Claire McCaskill’s election-watch party, something that we have never done before, I could not shake the feeling that what I was really doing was letting the world know that we had chosen sides and we were not backing down.  This was serious.  There was going to be a fight over this.  Win, lose or draw, we had taken a stand.  This brings me to the first lesson learned from this election cycle:

Some fights just cannot be avoided.   Some points of view must be confronted.  Hate wins if the peaceful become indifferent.

Just two weeks before the election, my wife and I had to attend a meeting in North Carolina and make a couple of customer calls in Tennessee for our small business.  We had heard that the fall colors in the Smoky Mountains were nearly at their peak and that they truly are a natural wonder.  We decided to drive to these meetings hauling our old, yet newly refurbished, camper trailer to a series of campgrounds along the road to North Carolina.  It had been a tough summer.  Our business continued to struggle to stay alive.  My new business was not making much money.  We had had a record heat wave and drought in Missouri.  Short of the skies opening up and raining frogs, the mood in our household had become one of dull despair.   The endless babble of politicians ranting and raving felt like salt in a wound.  I had long stopped watching television and now switched off the radio for fear that the anxiety that it instilled in me would give me an aneurysm.

As we made our way through Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, the scenery was indeed beautiful, though pock-marked by billboards of the most hateful variety.  Many had latent and not-so-latent, racist undertones suggesting that our troubles had been caused by the fact that we had a black president.  It was hard to believe that we were travelling through the United States in the twenty-first century.  At a gas station in North Carolina, a man pulled up to the fuel pump next to the one I was using.  He was driving an enormous and very expensive bus-style RV that when parked next to my busted up Dodge dually towing a thirty year old camper trailer created a socio-economic contrast that seemed quite stark.  He started to blame the president for fuel prices which were oddly much higher in North Carolina than in its neighboring states leading me to wonder out loud if the state legislature had played with either fuel taxes or supply to infuriate voters during the election cycle.  He railed against the president and when I tried to take a conciliar tone in an effort to put the conversation in some frame of peacefulness, he noticed the Obama sticker on my truck and said, “there has been too much politeness and it has wrecked this country; I intend to fight anyone who thinks otherwise – even you.”

My thoughts almost immediately wandered off to a historical account I once read describing how American revolutionaries raided Tory households, burned them and took all of their goods and livestock.  I wondered what the French revolutionaries would have thought about a massive RV and a cranky old guy who spent hundreds of dollars on fuel just to cross his own state and was highly indifferent to anyone other than himself.   As this man’s tone became increasingly hostile, I thought of Mao Tse-Tung’s statement that all true political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.

I am the founder of a small, edgy, new capitalism company that is based on the belief that business conducted with conscience can solve many of the world’s problems.  We engage in high social impact hiring favoring job candidates, like veterans and others, who have been chronically unemployed.  Three of our fifteen employees were hired right out of prison halfway houses.  We hire people over the age of sixty-five.  We hire homosexuals and racial minorities.  At our little company, the managers engage in a tradition of preparing lunch for our workers every Friday.  They take turns doing this.  They pay for the food out of their own pockets after our investors objected to the company paying for the lunches.  At our little company, we thank our people with deeds.  We eat in community.  We live in a diverse tribe that we most happily call “us”.

Incidentally, we have no absenteeism at our company to speak of.  We have no interpersonal disputes.   When one of our employees recently fell off the wagon into drug addiction, the entire company intervened and took a stand for his wellbeing.  He pulled out of it because we would not let him fall.  At our little company, we pursue wellbeing for the planet (we make energy-saving, heat rejecting window shades), for the people (including our local community and our state) and for profit.   This is referred to in the new economy as “the triple bottom line” and at our little company, it is our religion.

Over the past two years I have heard a perpetual and shocking political rhetoric shouted by people who are afraid of loss and afraid of change.  I have watched a very large segment of our national population openly attack gays, immigrants and minorities blaming them for our recent hard times.  I have been astounded by this, given that it is very well known that banks and the greed of oligarchs created the most recent global economic disaster.   I could not help but notice, however, the parallels to other points in history wherein large masses of people responded to loss and fear with hate.  The gay bashing that occurred during the election of 2012 reminded me of the racial battles in the Deep South in the 1950s and 60s.  The battle over gay marriage looked sadly similar to the signs that once hung over drinking fountains reading “whites only”.

Conservative media barraged the public with an endless stream of hateful mantras.   There seemed to be in the public conversation during this election cycle an enormous amount of blatant lying that we have not seen in the past.  This reminded me of the famous public relations premise asserted by Hitler’s propaganda minster, Joseph Goebbels,  that if you tell a lie frequently enough it becomes accepted by the masses as the truth.   The spin doctors were not trying to win our hearts and minds through inspiration and the promise of fresh possibility.  They were trying to program us to hate and fear.  This brings me to the second lesson of this election:

Hate is always the wrong side of history.

Over the course of this election cycle, I had developed a considerable disdain for the absence of critical thinking that seems to pervade national debates on policy.  I have come to appreciate that elections and the suffocating messaging that we, the people, receive during the course of them distort our view of what is really happening in our government.   An example of this distortion is the conservative media assault on the president following the Libyan consulate attack this summer.  Conservatives derided the president for not responding to the Muslim world with hostility.  As the leader of a nation, the president had to manage the safety of thousands of embassy and consulate workers at risk in the Muslim world without the luxury of grandstanding in response to the attack.  There was a very real risk that hostility was spreading through Islam, fanned by Al Qaeda and other hostile organizations, and that a misstep could put at risk a very large number of our people in the field.

The manner in which the president was attacked on this point exposes a tear in the fabric of our society.  There is nothing new in politics about exploiting a complex situation for political gain.  There is nothing new about a mob of people, fanned by anger and devoid of factual information and critical thinking, rising up in misguided rage.  In fact, the furor that was intentionally fabricated by conservative media over the Libya attack was an attempt to do to Americans what Muslim agitators did to the people who actually attacked the consulate.  In other words, this type of rabble-rousing is designed to make people angry and take irrational action, rather than critically think through complex issues.

For this very reason, Benjamin Franklin himself was very concerned about overly democratizing the country that he helped create.  The public will believe anything if spoken into their own emotional prejudices.  He ought to know, he published anonymously, attacked his opponents with half-lies and stretched truths and knew first hand that the common man is a gullible and volatile creature.  This is why the United States is a republic and not a pure democracy.  This is why we have an electoral college instead of a direct popular vote.  Mobs, especially regionally centered mobs, can be inflamed to act irrationally and our nation cannot allow itself to be governed by blind fury.

When you look at map of the 2012 election results across the United States, you see a sea of red.   Looking at the map as a territorial description of political ideology, it would lead one to believe that the vast majority of the United States is conservative dotted by tiny enclaves of liberalism.  This would be the truth if dirt could vote.  That votes do not come from square feet of territory, they come from people and people are more densely clustered in urban areas. This reality of the American political landscape is quite clear: the denser the population becomes in any given area, be it in Massachusetts or Louisiana, the population becomes increasingly tolerant, progressive and liberal.  In short, the battle between liberal and conservative points of view can be described almost entirely in terms of population density.  This brings us to our final lesson from the election of 2012:

The more closely you live with people that are different than yourself, the more likely you are to have empathy for them and the more likely you are to be willing to engage with their problems as your own.

Simply put, there is a direct correlation between the inevitable diversity of dense populations and the likelihood of tolerance that arises as an inclusive sense of “we”.  White-flight suburbs and rural areas have considerably less empathy for minorities such as people of color or gays because these groups are not prominent stake holders in those communities.   When you live among a predominately white Christian population, you are not compelled by your Jewish, Muslim, black or Hispanic neighbors to make room for a more inclusive point of view.  Diversity can become irrelevant to you in a highly homogenous community.   People who are not like you do not directly impact your community experience.  They are “other”.  They are outside of your concern.  They can be easily targeted as the enemy in the public dialogue.

The American debate has divided itself down largely cultural lines.  Nearly half of all Americans dream of living in a community wherein everyone looks like they look, prays like they pray and thinks like they think.  Frequently, this desire for homogeneity is based on a fear of the other and the yearning to live in a dream of narrowly defined by self-identification and chauvinistic justification.  It is the myth of America as a Norman Rockwell painting where everyone is white and everyone lives in the comfort of a small town stereotype.  Conformity is a direct response to the fear of the unknown.

The other half of the nation takes stock in diversity.  They are not threatened by different skin color, cultural values or gender orientation.  These people largely prefer the variety of mixed communities and through sheer experience have come to accept that people can be different and still function as a community.   When you live in a city, you become used to colorful people.  You become used to the traditions of religions that may not be yours, but are familiar to you.  You make friends with all manner of people because there is no place to hide from them.  It is not courage or idealism that motivates this mutual awareness and tolerance, it is merely the repeated opportunity to encounter and cope with a broader spectrum of the human race.

Stated conversely, the more isolated you are from people of color, gays, immigrants – the more singular your cultural surroundings – the more intolerant you will become because you are simply not a stake holder in the lives of people different than you nor are they stake holders in your life.   You do not develop the coping skills that allow you to adapt to life with people who live differently from you.   It is easy to be afraid of people you see on television, but with whom you have no personal experience.  It is easy to be jaded when there is only one church in your town.

America is growing more diverse, not less so.  America is becoming browner, not whiter.  America is becoming a true melting pot in the cities, but not so much so in suburbs or in rural areas and this will only increase the cultural divide.  White isolationism is doomed.   This is a good thing.  I like tacos and sushi.  I like music from Africa and South America.  My gay friends have the same problems in their relationships as I have in mine.  I feel whole with them.  I live only blocks from gang bangers and they do not scare me.  It is not serendipitous in the center of St. Louis where I live, but it is comfortable and interesting.

A few years ago, I remember having a white employee and a black employee who had considerable difficulty working together.  It was clear that they were both racist.  I made them share one of their breaks together each day and required that they spend those breaks sharing with each other details about their childhood and their families.  Over a period of months, I noticed that they started to exchange jokes and became quite productive when working together.  They never became great friends, per se, but they did learn to live peacefully with each other.   A lot can be learned from sharing a meal and dancing with those who scare us.