This moment in the American story feels like that time in class when the teacher told everyone to be quiet and listen.
You remember. You were there.
There was a student, or maybe two or ten, who wouldn’t stop talking. They were in a conversation or laughing about something. They were brazenly defiant of the teacher. Or, maybe they weren’t and were just oblivious to what the teacher was asking of them.
There was another student, or maybe two or ten, who heard and wanted to do what the teacher was asking of the class. They knew the importance of being quiet and listening. Or maybe they saw no value in being quiet and listening; they were just compliant and didn’t want the teacher to be upset.
At some point, one of the quiet students, fed up, began shushing the other students. “Shhh! We need to be quiet and listen,” they implored.
Sometimes the other students caught on, stopped talking and began listening. Often, they didn’t.
Sometimes, when they wouldn’t, the shushing students began shushing louder. Sometimes they started yelling. Still, other times, they simply gave in and joined the chatter. Occasionally, the students who had been talking got upset at the shushing students and started yelling at them.
Sometimes the whole class would devolve into chaos.
We really needed to be quiet and listen, but we couldn’t.
Sometimes, the chaos would shift to blame. Who started it? Who kept it going when it was about to subside? If a video camera had been placed in the class, or we had an unbiased, third-party observer come in to reconstruct the situation, we could have easily determined who bore primary responsibility. But did that even matter anymore?
There were so many other factors at play aside from what was going on in that class.
You remember. You were there.
Some of the chattering students were kids who had been told at every turn by everyone in their lives to “shut up,” and they weren’t taking it anymore. Some of them had rarely, at any point in their lives, been shushed, and didn’t know how.
Some of the quiet students just wanted peace. Some would have been the loud students in another class. Others wanted something from the teacher—a better grade or expanded classroom privileges.
I haven’t even mentioned the teacher– often patient and competent, many times exasperated, and, let’s be honest, sometimes power-hungry or ill-equipped to manage a class.
You remember. You were there.
This moment in the American story feels like that.
Only this time, many of us have a tool we carry around in our pockets wherever we go to shame the other students. We use it to assign blame. Sometimes, we use the tool to remind the quiet students that there have been plenty of classes when they were the disruptors.
Or we show the teacher how they have been inconsistent with enforcing classroom rules.
Sometimes we make up stories about the origins of the chaos. Almost all the time we reframe narratives for our benefit.
Oh, and one last minor detail: Many of us have guns.
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Trump, we have seen and heard many people on all sides of our political spectrum tell us we need to be quiet and listen. Many of them have used the thermostat metaphor, imploring us to “lower the temperature.”
Some of those calls have been sincere, and others have been used to clandestinely assign blame.
It seems we all know we need to be quiet and listen, but we don’t know how. Or, we are waiting for the other side to go first.
You know. You are here.
In light of the events of this weekend, Good Faith Media has shifted our scheduled Monday articles to Tuesday. In their place, we are posting this editorial and an opinion piece by Rebecca Kennedy.
Kennedy’s article was originally scheduled for tomorrow but is especially poignant today. It recognizes the dire times we are in and how challenging it will be to change the tide. But it also offers hope and gives us a template for fruitful dialogue.
It challenges us to do more than just be quiet and listen. It calls us to understand.
Senior editor at Good Faith Media.
