Realizing What You Don’t Want

 

A lot of politics is taken up with disputes over what people want and how to attain it.  On the lighter side, as an example, while in the state legislature, I recall vehement arguments made between sportsmen about when and how long the deer season should be.   Everyone wanted a healthy and sustainable deer population, but it was sometimes hard to find agreement on how to achieve that.

In a larger and more serious context, we all believe we are patriotic yet we still squabble a lot about how best to achieve that.  Is a Democrat more patriotic than a Republican?  Is our Democracy best protected by increasing voter participation or by suppressing it more to weed out suspected fraud?  Back and forth we go, with both sides saying they are trying to achieve the same patriotic end.

Then, rarely, there can come a moment of national unity, when we stop bickering and people start coming together.  Usually, that happens not when people agree on what they want, but when they “sure as the dickens” realize what they don’t want.

In 1940, the year before the United States entered World War II, there was a lot of bickering and debate in the country over extending the military draft.  An extension of the draft finally passed the House of Representatives but only by one vote.  Then, the following year, we had Pearl Harbor.   After that, there was national unity and extending the draft wasn’t even an issue.   The attack on Pearl Harbor made everyone realize what “we don’t want,” i.e., a foreign power attacking our country.  Our country went to war. (The draft itself lasted up until the end of the Vietnam War.)

I think it was something like a “Pearl Harbor” moment that happened to the collective psyche of the West recently when Russia attacked Ukraine.   Most Americans wouldn’t know the difference between a Russian and a Ukrainian, but when they saw Russians bombing Ukrainian cities and indiscriminately  killing innocent civilians—our national mood changed.   We may not have known much about the old hatreds and fears between these countries, but we realized, and instinctively knew, that this kind of destruction and killing was wrong.   A common vision emerged.  It illustrates my point—often we can’t agree on what the world should be, but we collectively know when we see something that we don’t want it to become.   

Often we can’t agree on what the world should be, but we collectively know when we see something that we don’t want it to become.   

It is a sad commentary, I suppose, that sometimes it takes such horrific events to unify people.  But, to America’s credit, when this has happened to us in the past, we have usually made progress in the end.  World War II ended with our two mortal enemies, Germany and Japan, becoming two of the strongest democracies in the world.  The United Nations, established then and though plagued by lack of enforcement power since, continues as a way for nations to settle disputes short of war.

Maybe, hopefully, when the current darkness ends in Ukraine, democracy can make another step forward.  And, who knows, maybe the brief democratic period that occurred in Russia after the Berlin Wall came down, can be resurrected.   Our hopes for a better world should never be overcome by the travails we face when the dark side of humanity periodically raises its ugly head.  Sometimes realizing what you don’t want can end up being a good thing.

Rolland Kidder