In a Time of Crisis, Let's Stand Together

For quite some time, aided and abetted by a rapacious media and take-no-prisoners howlers-at-the-moon on social media, "partisanship porn" has been America's most enduring frame of reference. You're either with me or you're the enemy, the idiot, or simply beneath contempt. Thus one must be ridiculed, de-friended, socially ostracized, and/or ignored. All of our differences are irreconcilable and civil war inevitable.

Except that it's not.

This writer is a conservative who finds much of the progressive agenda wrongheaded at best and detestable at worst. But an agenda is not a person and hatred, simply for hatred's sake, might be the most contemptible default position one can have — in the best of times.

In a time of national emergency, it may prove deadlier than the coronavirus that has precipitated that emergency.

One wants to point out that the Trump administration has done a lousy job reacting to the virus, while someone else wants to counter that there's a double standard regarding how well the Obama administration handled swine flu and Ebola? Point and counterpoint. Tit for tat. Nah, nah, nah, nah nah.

Toward what end, other than to stoke division in a time when unity is desperately needed?

Columnist Micheal Goodwin reminds us that even during a world war, soldiers on both sides took a respite from the baser aspects of the human condition. "Starting earlier in December and culminating on Christmas Day in 1914, many allied British and French troops on one side and Germans on the other left their trenches and greeted each other on No-Man's Land," he writes. "The sudden fraternization happened on many spots along the Western Front, with soldiers swapping souvenirs, raising toasts, singing Christmas songs and playing soccer."

He believes the same mindset should prevail in Washington, DC. "If warring European soldiers could do it a century ago, surely warring American political leaders can do it today," he asserts. "God knows our nation needs a truce."

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