The Smoke In Our Eyes

As my neighbor yelled at me on our front stoop, he stopped for a moment while he clearly had a revelation.

“Are you a LIBERAL!?!” he bellowed. “Yeah, you’re a liberal. You all just want to control everybody.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. My downstairs neighbor, Ross, had lost his temper because I’d left him a carefully worded note asking whether he could somehow reduce the amount of cigarette smoke coming out of his apartment. Ross had stopped me as I was coming back into the building after tossing trash into the dumpster.

Ross said he had been living in the apartment for more than 10 years and nobody had ever complained. I explained that on this beautiful spring day, my apartment smelled of the cigarette smoke that was coming up the vent and through the windows.

When he pivoted to the liberal accusation, I knew we couldn’t possibly talk about anything at that moment. I said that politics had no part of what we were talking about and walked back inside.

Of course, I was stewing about the confrontation later, but I had made a commitment to myself that I would not inflame arguments. This was in 2014 and I had quite enough of the anger machine that American discourse had become. Maybe I was in training for the years to come.

The Fortified Party Lines

Although we have a two-party tradition, it is really two power centers fighting over the people in the middle. In the latest Gallup poll available, 26% of Americans identified as Republicans, 31% as Democrats and 41% as independents.

That survey was in mid-August, but those numbers have never strayed enormously since Gallup started the survey in 2004. Sometimesthe percentages remain about the same, with a larger middle between them.

In other political systems, there are parties with which to build coalitions. The U.S. Congress has smaller groups along particular alignments. But those groups are not aligning very well with each other.

Instead, the party that tugs the middle a little in its direction wins — and these days that is done by appealing to our basic emotions. The fear button is a reliable one, perhaps too reliable. Americans seem to be afraid that at any moment, hordes of Antifa or fascists will come burn down or shoot up their cities. You might even be one of the people nodding yes as you read that.

It is true that we have deep social unrest right now. But instead of tending to the problems that led to our situation, we are all arguing about whether to call the unrest protests or riots.

The middle class is fracturing for many reasons — most of which are not one party’s fault. For example, a century of automation has pushed people out of well-paying industrial jobs, and we have not retooled and reskilled.

We used to be able to do the big things that improved individuals and propelled the national good. At the end of World War II, we had more than 16 million veterans trying to start or restart their lives.

It would have been easy to have just said those veterans and their families were on their own. But the U.S. government helped by providing the GI bill, home loans and health care, just to name just a few benefits.

The GI bill helped about 10 million people by 1956. My father was one of them after the Korean War. He was the son of Italian immigrants and worked in a store before joining the Marines. When he returned, he went to college and became an accountant. He could not have dreamed a future like that was possible for him.

A college education is once again a distant dream for many Americans. We all want the finest doctors, scientists and other professionals in the world, but require them to assume up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to become qualified.

I hear from many insurance agents and financial advisors who say that clients with high incomes are struggling because of student loan debt along with the cost of child care and college.

Our health care system is another victim of political manipulation. We aren’t talking about how to fix our system — we are taking sides.

All our language suggests there is a war going on out there in America. If there is, what are we fighting about? It does not seem to be for the nation’s well-being.

The United States does not succeed when one side “owns” the other. This country is successful when it sees itself as one indivisible nation with shared problems, not separate red and blue confederacies.

The War At Home

Later in the day of the confrontation with Ross, while at a bakery I bought two plump muffins for Ross and his wife. I knocked on my neighbor’s door, and when Ross swung it open, I said, “Hey! I was at the bakery and thought you folks would like some MUFFINS!” and raised the bag.

Ross looked at the bag, then me, the bag, then me, and then dropped his head as he said, “I’m trying to quit smoking.”

I realized the agitation Ross had been facing, and told him I knew it was tough because I had also quit. I added that I was able to be successful by getting out and walking and running instead of smoking. After talking about that a little, he took the bag and went inside.

I hadn’t seen Ross in a few weeks and hoped things were OK, but I was content with the thought that I’d done the best I could.

During another beautiful day, I saw Ross bound out of the building. He spotted me and said, “I am going for a walk.”

It was the first time I had ever seen him smile.