I’ve heard the comment a number of times over recent years that the world is becoming more contentious and divided, more divisive. I tend to think this attitude is attributable to people either not knowing, or understanding, history. Or perhaps it is that as we grow older we recognize sources of contention and divisions that have always been there but didn’t impact us enough for us to notice, or to care. I don’t think the idea that the world, or our country, is more contentious and divided today than in the past holds up to scrutiny.
I was born in 1965 at Loring AFB at the northern tip of Maine. My father was a B-52 Bomber pilot. His job was to be ready at a moment’s notice to jump into his nuclear armed bomber and fly off to annihilate some city in the Soviet Union. This military strategy was an implementation of the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” which underpinned the relationship between the Soviet Union and their satellites in Eastern Europe and the United States and our NATO allies. At the time there was what was called the Iron Curtain dividing mostly democratic Western Europe and communist Eastern Europe, a dividing line that citizens of the East attempted to cross only at peril of being shot. Germany was divided in two, democratic West Germany and communist East Germany. Part of the old capital of a formerly unified Germany had a wall around it, the Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Berlin.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall unceremoniously was torn down by the people on the East and the West sides as part of a general collapse of the communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. By 1991, the formerly formidable Warsaw Pact was no more, replaced by a hodgepodge of states, some more democratic and “freer” than others, but overall the peoples of Eastern Europe, and even Russia, are much freer, and less divided, than before.
The other great communist country at the time of my birth, the People’s Republic of China, had just come through Moa’s Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962 which further devastated an already devasted country and directly caused the death by famine of tens of millions of people. Moa was soon to take the Chinese people on a further reign of terror known as the Cultural Revolution which lasted from 1966 to his death in 1976. Only upon Moa’s death, after the country had been ground completely into the dust, did China begin to open up somewhat to the world and the Chinese people allowed to rebuild their lives.
For all the problems China faces today with the country’s lurching back into a more Marxist worldview, and for all the problems the Chinese Communist Party has engineered for the near future of the country and the world, the people of China are certainly better off than they were 20, 30, 40 years ago, and much less divided from the rest of the world.
Outside Europe and China, communist insurgencies and right-wing terror groups, among other groups, fought throughout South America, Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The United States was involved in a bloody and costly war in Vietnam which divided the United States in ways not matched today.
I haven’t even mentioned the conflicts in the Middle East between the Jewish State of Israel and her Arab neighbors and the bloodshed and division caused through those conflicts. Or Nelson Mandela and the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa. None of these countries or regions are without their struggles even today, but I think its hard to argue the situations are appreciably worse, or the peoples more divided.
When I was in first grade in the early 1970’s my family moved to a small suburb just north of Cleveland Ohio named Bratenahl. Bratenahl was almost 100% white and the surrounding neighborhoods of Cleveland where we lived where almost 100% African American. Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs were one of the most racially segregated metropolitan regions in the country and had recently had race riots, as had many other cities across the country. Court ordered busing to end discrimination in urban school districts caused widespread divisions in Cleveland and throughout the country, from the Deep South to Boston, Massachusetts. Racial discrimination was much more rampant then and the country was certainly much more divided, and segregated, along racial lines than it is now.
Less serious contentious events like Iran-Contra and the Clinton-Lewinski Scandal, and countless others, divided the country then just as events of today continue to divide us at times.
One of the things that is different today is that people who feel aggrieved or have a contrary view can much more easily reach out to each other or have their voices heard. For all their faults, and there are many, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the internet in general have provided more and more people with a platform to express their thoughts and opinions and try to affect the prevailing narrative. That we may hear today voices that we never needed to hear in the past, or could successfully avoid or ignore, does not mean that there is more contention or more divisions today than in the past. The absence of contrary or dissenting voices should never be understood as agreement, or an absence of divisions.
Working to resolving issues, instead of burying them, is difficult and can lead to contention, but perhaps it’s the only way to truly heal divisions.