Peace means bringing divergent views together
“THERE are two sides to the story” – probably the key phrase from President Donald Trump’s impromptu responses to the media at Trump Tower (in New York) on Tuesday August 15.
Describing the previous weekend’s protest turmoil in Charlottesville, where a young woman – Heather Heyer – was killed by an “alt-right” man driving his car (deliberately, by all accounts) through a crowd at speed, as a “horrible moment”, Trump seemed to be at his most honest, but not his finest. His view? Both sides were to blame. To put things in context, Charlottesville is a university town of 47 000 people in Virginia (US), a little smaller than Grahamstown.
Its council was planning to remove a statue (sound familiar?) of General Robert E Lee (the key Southern general in the American Civil War) from one of the town’s public parks.
In response, the “alt-right” (a whitewash term for neo-Nazis, white supremacists and members of the Klu Klux Klan) had organised a unite-the-right protest for the Saturday, with people travelling from all over the country to attend.
The white and predominantly male protesters (about 1 000 in number) legally marched on the Friday night brandishing flaming tiki torches (like our citronella torches, the kind you light in the garden to keep the bugs away).
They chanted “we will not be replaced”, “Jews will not replace us” and “white lives matter”.
The next day, flanked by their rifle-armed militia (for “protection”, but better armed than the local police), carrying shields and Nazi flags, they confronted the “other” side. Inevitably, chaos, violence and death ensued. Aside from white nationalists in America, South Africans (of all shapes and sizes) are probably the only other people in the world who view Trump in a positive light. Our reason for doing so is very different.
We take heart from the fact that the country that “leads” the free world, is led – in turn – by someone who “betters” our own president when it comes to misogyny, boorishness, vested interests and an ego under threat.
For us, Trump’s fixation on fake news, undoing the legacy of President Barack Obama, the size of the vote he did or didn’t get, and building a wall to keep out the unwanted is an entertaining distraction from the failings of our own leadership – someone, somewhere else in the world has it worse than us.
Yet in the same news cycle that saturated the world’s (English) media with newly minted Nazi swastikas, very little mention is made of the Mount Sugarloaf mudslide that killed more than 400 people (with more still unaccounted for) in Freetown, Sierre Leone.
Scarce mention of the triple suicide bombing in a market in Mondarari, Nigeria, where 30 people were killed and 80 injured in what is assumed to be a Boko Haram attack, or the 32 suspected drug dealers killed over the weekend in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s latest “war on drugs” raids (that have claimed 3 400 lives so far). Therein lies the danger of Trump’s “two sides”. It’s a simplification – there are never just two sides to a story.
There are many sides – more than 7.5 billion and counting.
Each person has a unique perspective on the world.
Every community has its own story of pain and loss to tell.
But the practicality of hearing all the views defeats us; we cannot manage the weight of communicating with everyone and thus – in an information-overload world – we simplify to cope.
And in doing so, what we pay attention to is as important as that which we avoid.
It’s easier to be entertained by Trump’s reality-TV-presidency, than to acknowledge that the world is a tough place, for all.
The US’s population stands at approximately 323 million people, of which 77% self-identify as white (17.8% of which are Hispanic), 13% as black (African-American), 5.7% as Asian and 1.3% as American Indian. Charlottesville itself is 70% white. As to America’s history, there’s no denying that American Indians were there first, that their culture was decimated by the arrival of Europeans.
There’s no avoiding the fact that slavery was key in developing the US’s early economy and the foundation upon which much white American privilege is firmly grounded.
So why are white extremists talking about an ethno-state, a homeland?
Why do young white males feel so threatened by the presence of “others”?
What makes you print the words of Hitler on a T-shirt you wear to a protest, when approximately six million Jews (and more than seven million others) died as a direct consequence of his bigotry?
Is it because we live in a fake news world, where truth is dependent on how many times something is repeated (or re-tweeted by the president of the US)?
Is it because our world is brand-über-alles and that fundamental extremism (whether it be Isis or the KKK) employs the same marketing tools as the likes of Coca-Cola and other global brands?
Is it because Facebook and Twitter algorithms reinforce our (confirmation) bias by feeding us more and more of what we like?
Is it because our stories are re-framed by Hollywood gloss and our daily dose of television glorifies the cowboy?
Is it because the internet has provided radicals with connection across the globe, so whereas before it was one lost soul ignored in the corner of a village somewhere, now 1 000 under-threat egos can back-slap each other into extreme acts that net global coverage?
Or is it because blame-the-other is an easier game than building consensus?
For that is the real danger of two-sides-Trumpism. It undermines consensus.
It gains a foothold by deliberately casting its outlier view as the credible and rational alternative.
It creates a world of (only) two choices and insists that both views should have equal status – polarising communities and countries into us vs them.
Once the polarisation is set, then it simply becomes a matter of who carries the bigger stick, seats in parliament or ballistic nuclear missiles.
Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the active shaping of divergent views into a robust consensus.
It is founded in diversity, anchored in principle (not personality) and brought about by the hard work of listening to others, recognising their humanity and by allowing everyone room to breathe.
It’s as applicable in America as it is in South Africa.