When a baby is born, one of her first experiences is to be cradled up into her mother's arms, wrapped in the affectionate warmth of gentle cooing affirmations. A bond, a connection, an emotional tie is cemented at that moment. Hopefully, the child experiences those moments continually throughout her life. We never get too old to be hugged, touched, cooed over and most certainly wrapped into the arms of warm affection. Such a bond is the goodness of life.
On a less intimate, but still important, level, we also need a bonding experience with our neighbors. Politically, this is what citizenship is really all about. Citizenship is a bonding experience through which we know, on an emotional, often unconscious and intuitive, level that we are connected to each other. These connections are reinforced through neighborly conversations over the backyard fence, by helping each other out in small ways like sharing a lawn mower or a ladder, by participating in block parties, or in even larger ways, like joining political caucuses. Citizenship works when there are bonds of affection offered to each other. Without a bond between citizens, society drifts apart into fragments.
That, I think, is where we are headed. The bond between us has atrophied. We certainly see this in the body politic, but recently I was with my extended family celebrating the graduation of my sons. Conversation was mostly small talk, but at one point we veered off into things that actually matter. We began to talk about the unemployment rate, health care, the fires in the Southwest and the budget.
We all agreed that times were tough and the future looks frightening, but we spoke different moral languages. Among some, a consensus emerged that our military was cleaning up the world, making it safer for everyone. On the domestic front, the current austerity was considered a necessary response to government waste. Education cuts were deemed necessary because teachers have failed to teach the basics, foreclosures are the results of irresponsible individual decisions, social services are better administered by the church, and corporations need more tax cuts and less regulation in order to produce more jobs. My sister-in-law did not see the despair embedded in her hope that her college-bound son would get into an ROTC program, which, she believed, would give him a step up in life.
I disagreed with these ideas, but as soon as I voiced the contrary, folks jumped up to do whatever important thing needed doing. If the bonds of family affection cannot house conversations of seriousness, what real hope, I wondered, do we have that citizenship is possible? If our fate is to simply stop listening to each other as our hearts harden, we are, in the end, left doing only what we are told.