It’s nearly the end of 2023, a time for looking back and for looking ahead. I’m grateful to have made it through another year with most of my faculties intact. I’m blessed to have a warm, supportive network of family and friends. Over the holidays, I’ve managed to spend some extended family time in person and to avoid an excess of media. I’ve (mostly) avoided discussing politics, but still have heard the word “polarization” more times than I care to count.
I like to think that many of us, despite all the rhetoric and doom-saying, are more centrist than otherwise, with overlapping multi-layered allegiances—to family, to work group, to neighborhood, to profession, to age-mates, to craft groups. To varying degrees, many of us also affiliate with politically oriented groups at various levels. I think it does us a disservice to try to reduce anyone to a single level of allegiance, politically or otherwise.
Nonetheless, our current “in between” media environment, an evolving mix of broadcast, print, and internet-driven content, is surfeited with polling that purports to pigeonhole us by political allegiance and/or some aspect of our demographics. I could make a bonfire with all the pieces of campaign literature I’ve received warning of the end of the world if “the other side” wins. Though checking boxes on surveys may relieve a few of my frustrations, it does little to create or reinforce connections. Indulging my anger may feel righteous for a time, but it likewise does little toward solving problems. Nuanced discussions and concerted actions are needed and seem in short supply.
Many years ago, I applied to the United States Peace Corps. Once accepted, I was offered a two-year assignment with a United Nations agency, providing technical assistance in an economically struggling country. Over the course of the recruitment process, I was asked to affirm my allegiance both to the U.S. government and to the principles of the U.N. This was at a time during the 1980’s when there was serious talk of cutting off U.S. support for many international organizations. (Echoes of the same tendency are again current.)
I crossed my fingers that there would not be a serious conflict between the stated purposes of the U.S. and those of the U.N. I wondered where my allegiance would lie if such a breach occurred. Luckily, it was a choice I did not have to make. I think my assignment helped persuade some of my in-country coworkers that there was more to Americans than bellicosity or arrogance. The work done by our multi-national staff made a small but positive impact on the lives of the mostly peasant families we interacted with. Once my assignment was over and I returned to the U.S., I bought two flags—a U.S. flag and an “earth flag,” showing our blue-green planet as viewed from space. On holidays, I gladly flew both. (An image of the earth flag is on Wikimedia Commons as File:Earth flag PD.jpg)
Unless our lives have been exceptionally tranquil, we’ve sometimes been faced with potentially conflicting allegiances. What seems dangerous to me about our current era is that much of our public sphere seems intent on collapsing the many overlapping layers of allegiances of healthy societies into strictly “us versus them” categories.
I draw some solace from a recent experience of our soccer playing granddaughter. The school league in which she plays consists of several smallish secondary schools. At a recent game, the opposing team was short a couple of players at the start of play. It would have been perfectly acceptable, per the league’s rules, for our granddaughter’s team to claim a win by forfeit. Instead, our granddaughter and another player with friends on both teams added a layer of soccer jersey and played for the “opposing” team until enough of their players arrived to complete the rest of the game “normally.” I doubt anyone kept very close track of who “won.”
So here’s a wish that your 2024 will be multi-layered and nourishing, that you’ll have chances to experience some of the “win-win” results that can come from recognizing how multi-faceted and interconnected all of us are.
Jinny's Occasional Poems 