At the same time, however, I've expressed my frustration with FB opinions that seem to conflate an individual's emotional distress with broken politics. In my experience, the two are unrelated. To be sure, those of us who hail from privileged backgrounds (myself included) and came of age after years of respectable public conversations, debate societies, dance lessons, decades of social etiquette cues, suburban religious congregations, well-manicured lawns, and all the other public advantages afforded to children of corporate America: we detest disorder. With modest variations, we shrink from shrill and boisterous arguments. We resist being caught up in aggressive altercations of any type. And we tend to believe that the world should work in a decent and well-ordered way. This is not to say that there was no stress, pain, or heartbreak in our formation. All human beings know suffering of one type or another. Nevertheless, those of us from a discrete social class despise chaos.
For the first 35 years of my life, my political engagement was fundamentally well ordered: I applied for Conscientious Objector status when I registered with the local draft board at age 18, I worked that process with the assistance of professionals at the American Friends Service Committee, my local church not only had a carefully organized way for me to declare my intentions re: ministry but also for noting my moral opposition to war, the draft board hearing in Norwalk, CT was well run by well-trained managers, my subsequent years organizing with Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Union included carefully planned social protest with the help of well-trained lawyers, etc. My participation in public demonstrations against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon came with clear guidelines and expert organization. You get the picture: social engagement, even in opposition to the status quo, was conducted in a reasonable and decent way as is befitting my bourgeois background.
That bubble burst when I became involved in the rough and tumble politics of urban Cleveland. There was nothing bourgeois about winning an election in that town - or I might note in most of the rest of America. It did not work like my civics textbooks suggested. It was not well-ordered and rarely civil. Peoples' lives were at stake. So, too, their livelihoods and neighborhoods. I still recall with awe my first "debate" at the Polish Hall in Slavic Village. I was running for school board as part of Mayor Michael R. White's inter-racial reform team. We were challenging the entrenched political hacks and union bosses who had perpetuated decades of nepotism, cronyism, and bleeding the public trough for personal gain without ever advancing educational opportunity for the mostly poor, Black children of Cleveland. The budget of the Cleveland Board of Education was greater than that of the city of Cleveland so a ton of money was at risk.
I lived on the West Side of Cleveland, the mostly white, working class neighborhoods in an aggressively segregated city. There were pockets of wealth on the West Side as well as middle class neighborhoods that looked and acted like the suburbs of my youth. The East Side was mostly black, fundamentally poor, but with middle class pockets spread around that periphery, too. And in the center of town, in the old Eastern European neighborhoods was Slavic Village - a bastion of old-world culture - with all the blessings and curses of that reality. Our team was scheduled to debate their team - a cadre of old school, white ethnic pols with well-known names - and as soon as I stepped into the debate hall it was like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz: "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto." This was NOT the Citizens League endorsement committee. The beer was flowing, the tough white crowd was pumped up and angry, and I was certain I was going to get my then skinny white ass kicked multiple times that night. The short version is we made our pitch to cat calls, yells, racial slurs, and a host of other vulgar and ugly epithets. And thanks be to God the Mayor's team was there to make sure that after the ruckus we all got to our cars safely. For me, it was trial by fire.
THIS was how politics was done outside of my bubble. THIS was how it worked when political choices mattered, not as abstract preferences, but in life and death ways. I can't say I ever learned to be at home in that world. I still preferred the bourgeois cocktail parties in the middle-class neighborhoods of Black and White Cleveland. There I could speak without interruption, make the good government case with clarity, and answer well-formed questions But I learned. I got better at dealing with the verbal sparring and the potential for violence. And I listened to the pros about how to take care of myself in the fray. Four years ago, driving through Kentucky and Pennsylvania on the way to the wedding of two friends, I felt I was back in Slavic Village. The anger in the air was palpable. The rabid support for Trump was visceral and omnipresent. And, once again, I had to hurry through most places for fear of getting my ass kicked again. There was anger, heartbreak, and fear pulsating there in ways I had forgotten about in my Western Massachusetts middle class bubble.
All of which is to say: it is OK to be emotionally uncomfortable with the rage of this era. It is unsettling and sometimes terrifying. So, too, with the political debates: if they make you upset, please don't watch them. Take care of yourself. But let's not condemn what takes place at the debates from the limited perspective of our comfortable bubbles. It is not useful to confuse our dis-ease with exaggerated moral judgment. That's been my biggest concern and critique. And, yes, I still find carping about the impotence of the moderators disingenuous. They are operating from within a bubble, too and are only now getting up to speed about how to respond to the political chaos that is normative. Have you ever watched British Parliament? It is boorish and cruel, loud, and mean-spirited as well. From my limited perspective, however, their shouting is more like what politics looks, feels, and sounds like in most of the world than what I grew up with.
So, that's where I'm coming from. The medieval monk, Meister Eckhart, once said something like: Reality is the will of God. It can always be better, but you must start with what is real. And while what I see in our politics and debates is not pretty, it is real. The debate moderators are striving for the best they can do with what is real. My hope is that we do likewise with a minimum of judgment.
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