Americans have become so divided over issues like gender, race, religion, and politics, we can’t seem to agree on anything.
In fact, a poll last fall by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found so little agreement that it carried the headline, “Americans are divided over everything except division.” Eighty percent agreed that the country was divided. Other than that, the poll found little hope for consensus.
Journalist Carl Bernstein, famous for his reporting on Watergate, believes we are in a “cold civil war” with different groups of people unable to agree even on basic facts.
Our country may be as divided as it has ever been, with the exception of the Civil War, but experts in a variety of fields offer ways to begin healing the divisions.
America’s ‘empathy deficit’
In 2006, Barack Obama, then a US Senator from Illinois, said in a commencement speech at Northwestern University: “There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit.” Obama added: “We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principal goal is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. A culture where those in power too often encourage these selfish impulses.”
Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a Christian, says that loneliness is at the heart of what’s wrong with America. He believes we are more connected than ever technologically but increasingly disconnected socially.
“Not only do Americans no longer know their neighbors, but in many cases they simply don’t know many people who aren’t like them,” Sasse writes in Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal. “Fewer people know people across class divides.”
Sasse borrows a phrase from a Sports Illustrated article to say we’re missing the “hometown-gym-on-a-Friday-night feeling” he had as a kid in Fremont, Nebraska. “People walked…
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