DAVID MARCUS: How I stumbled on the secret to overcoming political division in today’s fractious USA
Over the past eight months, as I have been traversing the country, there is one inescapable but silent issue that I hear over and over again. Put bluntly, we don’t like each other very much.
In every state I’ve traveled to, I hear stories of family members and friends lost to the swarming waves of political anger, and I’m not here to say one side is to blame, though I have suspicions. I am here to say that I think I might have recently met the solution.
In Morgantown, West Virginia, having dinner one night recently, I met Mack and Michael, among the most unique pair of friends I have ever come across.
Mack the elder, at 79, and Mike, a sprightly 52, met years ago when they both worked in the area for a major corporation. Mack is a Democrat and no fan of President Donald Trump, Mike on the other hand votes GOP and sees Trump as a godsend.
“We talk about politics a lot,” Mike told me over some ramp deviled eggs, (ramp is an Appalachian delicacy, a kind of garlicky wild green onion) “but we try to stick to facts, not get too emotional.”
Mack added, “There are more important things than politics.”
In the hour or so that we spent talking, political issues did creep in, the tariffs, immigration, and one of the things I noted was that every time things started to seem a bit heated, Mike and Mack had nonverbal cues that kept things light, and on track.
“West Virginia was a Democratic state for a long time,” Mack correctly told Mike and I, “now it’s Republican, but the people are still the people.”
“I live outside of Morgantown, because it’s so liberal here, but people get along,” Mike added, his oldest boy is serving with 101st Airborne at Ft Campbell, something both men clearly took great pride in.
“My dad served in World War II,” Mack said, adding, “he was a hard man but loved his family and his country.”
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What came across, and I mean this in the manliest possible way, is that these two guys, this unlikely pair, really love each other. They know each other’s families. Mike would constantly say, “Mack, tell him that story about JFK, or the old days.”
I wish I could bottle whatever these guys have that let them rise above their political differences.
The next night, I found myself in Charleston, and like most state capitals, you can smell the power, a fragrant mix of lobbying cash, steak houses and strip clubs. There I met Brandon, who was passing through town for work.
I asked why he thought so many people in our country are so divided by politics, why so many friendships have been fractured and families frayed, why it’s not like the 90s when politics was an afterthought.
“Well, we didn’t define each other by our political views back then,” he told me. “We defined each other by how we treated each other, number one. Number two, I think the reason it happened so quickly, was COVID, and people lost their *****ing minds, lost their ability to define a human being, by who they are instead of their political views.”
Brandon finished by saying this is what happens: “When you put somebody in a house and all they have is constant bombardment of bullsh*t, and the division of a country, on purpose.”
What struck me about both of these West Virginia encounters is that the essential element to overcoming political division is physical human interaction. And at a time when Mark Zuckerberg and Meta want to give us all, and our kids, artificial intelligence friends, this gets scary.
Ultimately, a friend is not the person who can tell you what you want to hear. Anyone can do that. It is the person who can question your judgment while still valuing you as a person, but this is something the American left, and increasingly the right, have lost sight of.
When you sit in a town you’ve never been to as darkness falls and light a cigarette, you see quiet lives drift beyond corners, and know that everywhere, everyone is just as important to themselves as you are to you.
Mike and Mack realized that about each other a long time ago, and what flourished from it, what I saw clearly, was a model of friendship for all of us, and maybe, it is friendship, not politics, that can pave a better way forward.
