ELECTION 2016
Participation in recent conversations on FaceBook and
elsewhere inspire reflection and confession: I don’t know how to love my
enemies. That is the greatest ethical challenge of my life, but in this
election cycle, I even have trouble knowing how to love my friends and how to
avoid making them enemies. Challenges to my refusal to commit to voting for
Hillary Clinton come at me throughout every day from both public and private
sources. With these challenges, I feel powerful temptations to make enemies by lashing
out with name calling, obscenities, withering sarcasm, or condemnations of personal
and trivial weaknesses, real or imagined. Just like is coming from the
presidential candidates and their respective supporters.
Often in the privacy of my own mind or with friends I know
to be sympathetic I give in to these temptations, just like the candidates do. On some level, we
must believe these responses to hurt feelings work, at least to relieve the
hurt temporarily if not to resolve the conflict. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have
been targets of these kinds of enemy making. And both respond in kind, though
one is much more accomplished, loud, and confident with blasting his many
perceived enemies. Yesterday, I heard a TV news pundit say that daily
relentless attack on Trump is what Clinton needs to do to win the election. It
certainly seems to be working for Trump.
It makes me question my commitment to reasoned argument, respect
for all stakeholders’ viewpoints even when I don’t agree with them, seeking
common ground, and problem solving as the best way, long term, to resolve
conflict and find solutions. That commitment has been my attempt to love my
enemies. Both candidates
believe they have solutions for the public, and neither in this contest has any
interest in resolving conflicts between them. So winning, obviously, has to be
the primary goal. As it is in any competition. That doesn’t seem to be working,
that I can see, in solving the public problems.
All my ethical goals are at odds with winning as the top priority,
and I only know that I won’t vote for Trump nor support him in any way. But how
am I to love him? That is not a trivial question for me. There is not only him
we have to worry about. There are all of his steadfast supporters. If we don’t
find a way to respect the concerns of all those people, we will continue to
have the desperate problems we need to solve.
