Uncle Sam needs you – and me and our neighbors – on the same team | Opinion
The Buddhists have a saying: We already have everything we need. I’d add a qualifier. We already have everything we need if we are together. If we have each other.
Life is a team sport. I know, I know. Rugged individualism and all that stuff. But for you swim-or-sink conservatives, I’ll simply quote the legendary Gen. George S. Patton.
“This individuality stuff is a bunch of bullshit.”
Nearly everything big – everything important – gets accomplished by a team. So round up your friends and family and take a group photo. Meet Team America! And I mean the REAL Team America. Not some basketball or soccer team that gets us worked up about a trophy nobody will care about or even remember 50 years from now.
This is way bigger than that. We’re talking about whether the world’s oldest and boldest experiment in liberty will live to celebrate its 250th birthday.
Don’t laugh. Only the drugged, distracted or demented could miss that America has been sinking like a stone. There’s record inflation, $33 trillion in debt and at least two nuclear-armed dictators threatening our peace and stability. Ask 10 Americans if things are better or worse than they were in 2000, and 11 will say worse. And the really frightening part isn’t the dangers abroad or deficits at home. It’s that we don’t feel like a nation anymore. We feel like two nations. Maybe even three.
So where do you and your little team come in?
We must expose the falsehood that small groups of individuals cannot make a difference. Lay waste to the soul-crushing lie that says anything one, two or three people try to do is naïve and a colossal waste of time.
Nothing could be more wrong. America is essentially just 330 million individuals who live here and call the place home. And all those fancy words on those crinkly, old documents at the National Archives? They mean nothing unless the principles and ideals they express are found in the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens. Forget Congress. Forget the Supreme Court. All the politicians in the world can’t help us if we’ve abdicated our duty as citizens.
WE are Americans. Not just the mayor. Not just Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty. You, me, the little old lady next door who works in her garden and the pot-smoking teenager across the street. The guy with the Biden bumper sticker and the guy with the F*** Biden bumper sticker. One may be a bit cruder than the other, but both are Americans.
Here’s what’s so challenging about the present moment: It’s that each side thinks it’s doing the right thing for the country and that the other side is a threat to the country. The first part is great, but thinking the other side is evil or un-American is the real threat to the country. Your political opponent isn’t a demon. He may be wrong, sure. But brace yourself. You may be, too.
Whether they’re religious or not, I would imagine that nine out of 10 Americans think you should be good to your neighbor. It’s a nearly universal law of life. But the catch has always been who your neighbor is. If it’s somebody who looks, loves and worships like me, then no sweat. But, of course, it’s not. Your neighbor is anybody and everybody you wish weren't. It’s the tatted-up skinhead, the vegan grad student, the gun-loving cattle farmer and the Muslim immigrant from Afghanistan. They’re all my neighbors. And I’m all theirs.
We aren’t going to argue ourselves back into national unity. We won’t get there by shouting. But we might get there by listening.
I’m guessing you put a country back together the same way you build a house. One brick at a time. So like I said, get your friends and family together for that team photo.
Uncle Sam needs you.
Buzz Thomas is an American Baptist minister, an attorney and a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Opinion: Uncle Sam needs you, me and our neighbors on the same team
