Us Vs. Them

March 18, 2016

Who’s to blame? They are. And they aren’t us.

That’s the distilled message we’re getting from presidential campaigns. Create a problem, identify villains, blame them for everything.

Unfortunately, it is a political infection that has spread to debates on local issues, too.

Our intrepid presidential candidates have certainly chosen different targets but all but Republican John Kasich are using some form of a divide and conquer strategy.

Donald Trump has mastered the technique, and they are anybody who doesn’t look, think, act or believe exactly as the candidate does. The anger he generates is infused with the images and language of violence. Drop bombs, torture, kill families, ban Muslims, beat-up protesters and so on. He’s good enough at it to have fit right in back in the 1930s.

Bernie Sanders is also plenty angry. He’s picked an easier, albeit tiny target: really rich people and Wall Street firms and banks. Sanders says they have "rigged the system" to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us. That sounds somehow right to people looking for scapegoats for their own circumstances. That the facts don’t line up with the accusation is just an inconvenience.

Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio and especially Ted Cruz have all tried variations on the "us vs. them" theme, though none as successfully as Trump or Sanders.

What nearly all are lacking, with the possible exceptions of Clinton and Kasich, is much of anything positive at all. They can’t stop talking about how dire our circumstances are, then demonizing some group as the source of the trouble. Then they’re back on the campaign jet and off to the next round of the blame game.

That same attitude seems to now pervade much of the local discourse. We’re told there is looming trouble on the near horizon for Traverse City; we must grow, must get more dense, must go higher. A kind of business model come new urbanism has enamored a majority of the City Commission.

These are ideas worthy of robust debate. To their credit, city commissioners have kept their discussions civil and mostly rational. The same can’t be said for a public eager to take sides first and get some information later.

The issue of a nine-story building on Front Street, for example, was quickly derailed by those wanting it to be an old vs. young, rich vs. poor, or city vs. rural debate. Any discussion more nuanced than accusing older generations of standing in the way of progress or accusing young people of destroying the character of downtown was lost on too many. Us vs. them.

There’s a slightly different situation at the Grand Traverse County Board of Commissioners. Their problems involve budget issues not easily broken down into an "us vs. them" battle. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped some anonymous online trolls from making the supervisors the "them."

Vaguely threatening, personally degrading and insulting and without any purpose other than causing discomfort, comments and e-mails continue to be regularly directed at some commissioners. Not the normal political hectoring that seems to be mandatory in nearly all comments section, but ugly personal attacks and all done using pseudonyms. It is both cowardly and repugnant.

Reality actually requires no blame at all. The fact is our economy has been improving slowly but surely, for most of us, for nearly four years. Neither Muslim Americans nor immigrants, legal or otherwise, are out to ruin our country. The trade imbalance is only a problem if we no longer want imported goods.

Locally, Traverse City is actually doing just fine. The rush to constantly do more is based on an artificial construct that movement equals quality (and please, please stop talking about our "urban core." A city of barely 15,000 people occupying less than nine square miles doesn’t have an urban core; it has a downtown).

Politicians encourage us to be discouraged because it suits their campaign strategy. They cavalierly point fingers of blame hoping to divide us along political, racial, economic and gender lines. Us vs. them.

Don’t we get it? There is no conspiracy of "them" to deprive us of anything. The much maligned 1 percent avail themselves of laws and regulations passed and promulgated by people we elected. Those terrible immigrants are no different than were our ancestors who came looking for work and opportunity.

Blaming someone else for our woes, while an apparently effective campaign strategy, is a peculiarity in a country whose people pride themselves on their independence and individuality.

A better strategy might be to honestly acknowledge the obvious – we are them. We are the problem and we are the solution. Finding targets to blame won’t improve our lives at all. There is no us vs. them; there’s just us.