Detesting our race to the bottom in order to win

Recently, I was looking through some old letters that my mother and father exchanged when Daddy had traveled down to Mississippi in 1968. I’ve written about that trip many times, because it was historic and heroic and nothing makes me prouder than knowing Ted Flowers went to the still-segregated South during a sweltering late spring, to register black voters and represent indigent black defendants in the criminal courts. It’s the best thing he’s left me, greater than money and more valuable than the education he paid for with his blood, sweat and tears.

Mixed in with the usual accounts from my mother about my babbling toddler brother and the fact that I was “moping” around the house and looking forward to my kindergarten graduation, there were some sobering passages from Ted about the “welcoming committee” down in Hattiesburg. He wrote about little kids, dressed in their Sunday best, even though it wasn’t Sunday, looking at the white Yankee lawyer there to “make trouble.” They called him “white n-----” and spit in his direction (some of them with the accuracy of a sniper).

Fifty years ago, you expected that kind of treatment. Americans really hated each other, whether it be along color lines, or on college campuses where the police were considered “pigs,” or in the streets where returning Vietnam veterans were called “baby killers.” That hatred oozed dangerously into the minds of killers like Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray and the killer of Medgar Evers.

And it all came together at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 when even men as erudite and mannered as Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley devolved into fueding street urchins, calling each other crypto Nazis.

Daddy was glad to see those days recede into the darkness, before he died in 1982. I’m glad he’s not here to see the resurrection of the hating years, which might not be as dangerous in a practical sense but which, at a deeper level, are as damaging. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is denied the chance to eat a peaceful meal because she works for Donald Trump. Kirjsten Nielsen is heckled at a Mexican restaurant (not a wise choice after her press conference on problems at the border but I guess when you want a taco …). Protesters of the travel ban, and other things, mass outside of Stephen Miller’s home. And on it goes.

Conservatives aren’t the only targets, as we saw with the white supremacists in Virginia (and no, Mr. President, there aren’t “good people on both sides”). But the vast majority of the attacks these days seem to be against people who openly announce themselves as conservative, or who are perceived to have that orientation by association. It’s a troubling thing, reminiscent of the spit and obscenity aimed at my father a half century ago.

But this column isn’t about one side being harmed more than another. It’s not about racking up pity points and evaluating the level of victimization. This is not a zero sum game.

I’m saddened, no, I’m disgusted with what I see happening in a society that now believes they must abandon civil discourse in order to “win.”

The thing is, people act as if they are doing something courageous, something momentous, something historic and noteworthy.

They strut around as if they are making a contribution, and count the likes in their social media echo chambers, apparently unaware that they are only being listened to by equally jaundiced fellow travelers.

I think back to my father, who stared hateful children in the face, straightened his back, and walked on with dignity.

I’m glad he’s not here today.