Letter to the Editor

Podcast Guest Don Williams

Coming next week, another podcast visit with Don Williams. Among other accomplishments, he is the winner of BWW’s “Most Popular Podcast Guest”. To that point, Don will make a return visit next week. (Watch This Space)

Recently, Don dropped thoughtful Letter to the Editor of his local newspaper. With his permission - and courtesy anonymity - here it is…

BW

The Editor

The XXXXXXXX XXXXXX

Twenty years ago Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards espoused the idea of “Two Americas.”  Two decades later his paradigm has come true.

When I was young there were competing factions of American politics, but these visions mostly differed on how to implement common values for the common good.  In general, everyone agreed about where we were (Point A) and where we wanted to go (Point B).  What the polity disagreed over was the best path to get there, and that disagreement was generally in congenial terms.  For the most part voters on one side of an issue got along just fine with voters on the other side, they disagreed about issue(s) but realized that life is more than just politics.

Not so today.

Our society has become so fractured that the two primary cohorts not only disagree on the paths to Point B, we do not even agree where or what Point B is.  Further, we do not agree on where we are (Point A) nor where we came from, who we are nor what we are.  Historically, when societal tribes do not share a common vocabulary there are storm clouds on the horizon.  Nation, human, man, woman, justice, prosperity, flourishing, culture, virtue; these are just some of the ideas and words for which the Two Americas do not share definitions.  In that context I cannot be sure of the outcome of any “civic discourse,” but I fear and believe that it will not be a happy one.  We saw the merest glimpse of that future when one political faction embarked on a campaign of burning, looting, and murder in 2020 with virtually no consequences. 

At our nation’s founding one of its progenitors, John Adams, remarked that, ”Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate for the governing of any other.”  Looking around, I do not see that we are a moral people so our “rule book” cannot work.  Thus, the upcoming civic ritual is less of an electoral contest between candidates and more of a verdict on us, the American people.   

Our ancestors tried national divorce twice before, successful in 1783 and unsuccessful in 1865.  What will we do moving forward?  If we do not share common values and a common vocabulary, how likely is it we can continue to share a common space?

Don Williams

“The Barn on White Run”

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