(The mid-terms are a week away and most of us are sick of Trump, political ads, and fund raising solicitations. I certainly am. For that reason this blog is about something else, about the role diversity plays in the health, vitality, and endurance of our democracy. I wrote it for myself as much as anyone else.)
The kind of nation we are and the strength of the democracy our founders bequeathed to us depends on many critical qualities, none more significant than diversity.
Diversity is the air democracy breathes, while at the same time may be the quality that causes people who believe in democracy the most consternation and discouragement.
That’s because diversity means being with people who don’t look like you, talk like you, think like you, believe like you, act like you, people you don’t like and people who don’t like you.
The whole truth about diversity is that it takes a large measure of courage, strength, tolerance, and determination to live in a country whose government preserves and protects diversity .
Diversity is demanding because you don’t get to control it. When groups, regardless of size, including nations, are open to everyone, that means everyone.
That’s how diversity works. Once you start limiting who is in and who is out you eliminate diversity. When you believe in diversity, you accept whatever that diversity looks like.
I’m not talking about lawlessness. For diversity to work everyone has to live by the same rules, same laws, same consequences for the same mistakes, because politically the playing field is level for everyone.
I have been in groups where I felt at home, and I have been in groups where I felt like I couldn’t get out of the room fast enough.
That’s the way diversity works. It puts you with strangers like you and strangers unlike you in every way.
Americans who don’t understand the essential role diversity plays in our life together often try to use it to divide us, set us against each other, promote fear of one another, try to convince us that difference is a bad thing, that looking alike, being alike, thinking alike is a good thing.
They are wrong. Difference is the good among us. Being with people not like us is one way we grow, mature, learn tolerance, achieve amazing things precisely because we had different ideas, approaches, views. Not the only way, but one way nonetheless.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that difference is what makes being together as “one nation, under God, indivisible” the gift it is.
Americans had to learn how to be a diverse nation, but once we did we have never looked back, welcoming strangers to our shores whose very difference has added beauty to who we are.
It’s no wonder diversity is so hard. It stretches us in the most uncomfortable ways. Numerous times a form of diversity I have encountered has made me wish I didn’t believe in diversity at all.
MAGA Republicans make me feel that way. I hate the fact that they are Americans. I wish I could banish them to an island they could never leave. I hate everything about who they are, how they think, the fact that they don’t think, that they have the right to vote, that they are even alive.
They push my commitment to diversity to its most extreme limits, yet, I know that is precisely the way it has to be when you believe in and value diversity.
Were I to have the power to silence and/or banish MAGA Republicans from the country, I would betray what I so strongly believe in – that diversity plays a foundational role in our being the country we are and in keeping us that way.
Being sometimes driven to distraction by diversity is the price we pay for believing in it. It’s the way democracy works. It’s what makes us the beautifully frustrating country we are.
I, for one, don’t want us to be any other way.
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