Coming Together

Coming Together

Healing the political divide and finding the humanity in those that disagree with us

Sean McCutcheon

Sean McCutcheon

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022914364

Copyright © 2022 by Sean McCutcheon

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1. Profiting from Our Division

2. The American Political Environment

3. The Role of Government

4. The Republican Party and the Politics of Fear

5. The Democratic Party and the Politics of False Hope

6. Traditional Media, Manipulation, and the Need to Diversify

7. Social Media and Maintaining Your Bubble

8. Owning Your Power

9. Dividing Lines and Commonality

10. Freedom and Responsibility

11. Cancelling Cancel Culture, Keeping Consequence Culture

12. Equality of Opportunity through Education

13. Fair compensation for your labor

14. Taxes and How Much We Get for What We Pay

15. Healthcare Ensures Personal Freedom

16. Employment Rights

17. All Citizens Should be Allowed to Vote

18. Guns and the need for self-defense

19. We Need to Fix Policing

20. Simple Prison Reforms

21. We Have Fixed the Environment Before; We Can Do It Again

22. Stitching Us Together

23. Major Hurdles

24. Accepting Our Entire History, Not Just the Myths

25. All Lives Should Matter, But Right Now They Don’t

26. No One is Replacing You

27. Members of the LGBTQIA+ are People Too

28. Abortion and Women’s Right to Their Body

29. Institutional Problems That We Can Fix

30. Capitalism vs. Socialism

31. Moving Forward

About Author

Acknowledgments

Foreword

We are being divided and convinced to hate one another, and we must stop that from happening. The purpose of this book is to help you see the humanity in people with a different opinion than your own. Over the years, I have seen a divide grow in this country between people on multiple fronts, including religion, race, and political ideology.

We have become engulfed in numerous conflicts where we do not see each other as people and have come to believe the worst about those different from us. I want to halt that division and bring us back together. There is much we agree on, but many people profit from us, remaining apart or hoping that we are so overcome by despair that we do not take action to fix things.

During the course of this book, I will be talking about serious topics and making some serious points, but I will try to do so in a compassionate fashion. I will not assign blame or fault in most cases because I am looking for a way forward, and I would like for us to do that together. However, there will be a few times where I will be looking at one side or the other almost exclusively to do the heavy lifting on a topic.

I started this book a few days after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, with Biden being declared president and Trump refusing to concede. Throughout this election cycle, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on how Trump received so much support during his presidency and what can be done to reconcile the differences that were exacerbated during his presidency but have been steadily worsening over time.

I am sure many people would like to lay the blame solely at Trump’s feet for this division and move on, but life is never that simple. Rather this division has been festering for a while, and numerous people enjoy exploiting these divisions to profit from our hatred and fear of one another or to use it for political gain. Plus, these exploiters tend to get the added benefit of avoiding any of the consequences of kicking over the anthill by stirring us up.

With that in mind, I will be talking a lot about some of the issues we disagree on and how we can find some common ground with those issues. I will not focus solely on who is responsible for exploiting our divisions; there are plenty of books blaming people for our current predicament. Most of them are not productive or conducive to solving our problems. I want to focus on resolving these problems and finding a way forward together.

Introduction

As with any new book, the reader's first thought is, Do I want to read this? It is each author's responsibility to help them make an informed decision about their book. So let me help with this decision as this book is not for everyone. It is mainly for the people who have felt we have lost control of the political discourse, those that have felt excluded in this discourse. It is for the people who want to make a change, those who are tired of being told that because someone disagrees with us, they are our enemy. It is for the people that understand that we are not a monolith.

Conversely, and I think just as importantly, this book is not for some people. It is not for the gatekeepers, and neither is it for the trolls. The gatekeepers believe that you must conform to all of a group's beliefs to be accepted as a member, which leads them not to challenge their thoughts and ideas. They believe in cancelling people that don’t perfectly align with their moral views. The trolls just want to cause chaos and trouble. They just want to make people angry. They want to lie to you and misguide you. Neither one of these groups wants discourse. Neither one wants us to see someone that disagrees with us as fully developed humans.

This book is for bridge builders. If you are tired of being told that the other side completely lacks humanity, then this is for you. If your media feeds are filled with nothing but despair telling you that there is nothing to be done, then this book is for you. Now, this is not filled with sunshine and rainbows. I will address difficult topics and, when I can, try to devise a course of action to help resolve an issue or at least help you see the other side.

There has been a trend that has been bothering me for a while now. Many of us have been insulated from people we disagree with or who may have a different opinion, and it has been getting worse. Many people are afraid or in pain, and we are having a hard time seeing that. Some people have lost hope.

But instead of dealing with that pain and despair, we are distracted into thinking their pain is a lie. Even worse, we are sometimes told that other people trying to heal are causing us pain. I hope this book helps you realize that just because people disagree with you does not mean they are your enemy. That when they try to fix an injustice that does not infringe upon you. I would love it if we eventually saw each other as an ally in resolving the issues we all face.

To illustrate the point of this book, that we are stronger together, I will start this off with a story. In late 2020 and early 2021, hedge funds were shorting the stock of the companies GameStop and AMC to make a lot of money. This process would have ensured that both companies died. However, in early 2021, many people came together to prevent billionaires from destroying those companies and hopefully make a little money while they were doing it. No one cared what beliefs each person had when trying to save these companies; they came together and stood up against these billionaires.

Afterward, many billionaires took to television and other media to express their displeasure about how they had been prevented from earning more money and that the rules needed to be changed so that commoners could not prevent them from earning billions by destroying companies again. The media gave these billionaires lots of airplay, and politicians from both sides wanted to understand what happened. They agreed that people should not be allowed to interfere in this process again.

Let me reiterate that lots and lots of normal people came together and stopped billionaires from destroying a few companies, and when they did that, the media demonized the people. Politicians wanted to take away the power from the regular people. These people worked together towards a common goal. They made a change; they were noticed.

The billionaires did not gain as much as they would like, but what about these regular people that actually made some money? What did they spend their money on? Bills, education, some gave to charity. These regular people took the money they earned and put it into their economies, while the billionaires that did not make as much money derided them.

We have more power than we know. We are not as separate from the other side as we are led to believe. If we work together, we can change the world. They know that, and so should we.

I, like many of us, am scared of the direction that this country is heading. However, unlike many, I am not afraid of one side or the other. I am more afraid that we are being convinced to hate each other. I am more afraid that we see each other as the enemy, and it is getting easier and easier to isolate ourselves. This allows us to believe the lies we are told and prevents us from working together.

We are told to divide and keep ourselves separate from one another. Today’s world also makes this so much easier. Not only does our media do its best to divide us and tell us the evils of the other side, but our social media also makes it easy to make an insulated bubble of thought that prevents dissenting opinions from entering.

A pandemic was thrown on top of all this, ensuring that we maintained a literal physical distance does not help the matter. However, we are more alike than we realize at times. We mostly agree on the problems facing our society, and both of us have good (and some bad) ideas on how to fix them. I want us to see the humanity in each other, and I want us to see the pain that the other is feeling, and I want us to heal the pain that we are going through.

I am tired of all the lies that we tell each other. I am tired of unintentionally spreading lies that I’ve been told. I am tired of all of the lies that are being spread about my beliefs. I am tired of all the lies being told about those who don’t share my beliefs. I am tired of the lies.

This is my attempt to tell some truths that need to be said. We need to hear each other more. We are all in pain and are all surprised when we find out that someone else is hurting too. We also do not ever want to think that our actions are causing other people pain, but sometimes they do, intentionally or not.

What can we do to fix these problems? That’s a great question. This book will tackle some of the problem areas and provide us with some places to start. More importantly, I know that many of us also want to fix these problems, and I want you to know, first and foremost, that none of us is alone.

Before the healing can begin in any process, truths have to be acknowledged. A light has to be shown upon the injury before healing can begin. However, in today's day and age, it is hard to see the truth. This is because it is so hard to tell what is true anymore. Especially since so many people make money off of lying to us and convincing us to hate one another and that we are what is wrong with this country.

I know that the most common rebuttal to being told that people make money off of dividing us is to say that we are trying to start a culture war. But what these people intentionally neglect to mention is that we are already in one, and we are losing. So, yes, we, all of us, the people that agree and those that disagree with you.

Because as long as we fight each other, we are not fighting to improve things. As long as we think that the opposite side is the problem, we are not dealing with the things making our lives difficult. There has been a long history of rich people telling poor and middle-class people that really poor people are the problem.

Now, before you think I want to burn it all down and start over, just know I do not. There is a lot of good that we have all achieved together, and many good things have happened in our country. So, while I want significant changes, I don't want to bring the system down. That only hurts the people at the bottom.

To illustrate this dichotomy, I am excited about the achievements of some of the wealthiest people in this country. Not just happy, I am excited for them and want them to continue to achieve success. My wife and I both have Amazon Prime accounts. Jeff Bezos worked amazingly hard to make his dreams a reality. Mark Zuckerberg has made a company that allows us to come closer together. They made amazing companies that have changed the face of the world. They have changed our discourse about energy independence, privacy, and interconnectedness.

Now while I think that their accomplishments should be praised, I also think that Amazon workers deserve bathroom breaks and that Facebook needs to work better to ensure our privacy and remove dangerously misleading articles. All because I think one thing is true does not mean I cannot think the other is true. You can hold two truths about something at once.

The most painful truth is that the changes, whether in viewpoint or action, will be difficult. Change always is. But as many of us know, there is only one way out: to assess the situation we find ourselves in honestly. This is something that we can do together. I hope that you see that we have more in common than we have that separates us. Additionally, I hope you see that some problems require input from all of us to make something even better.

To hit a couple more hard ones before we move forward, and if you take anything away from this entire effort, please let it be this: those on the left and right of the political spectrum care very deeply about this country, and neither of them wants to destroy it. If there is a second thing, your ideas are valid without invalidating their ideas; in fact, working together can make a better result for everyone. Lastly, a lot of people make money off of telling us lies and sowing division between us. Don’t let this work.

Have you seen how the Clintons, Bushs, and Obamas get along? Despite their massive political differences, they genuinely love and respect one another. They have a lot in common that goes beyond their political differences. They have a shared experience that bonds them. Many of you have bonds with people that disagree with you. Many of you have family or people you love that have different ideas.

As a personal example, everyone reviewing this book for me disagrees with me about something I will write; at least one of them will disagree with that sentence out of spite, and they definitely disagree with one another. However, we have shared experiences that created a bond that lets us see past those differences of opinion. Even if we view things from a different political light, the value they bring to my life far outweighs any difference of opinion. I value their input and insight, even though we think that the other one is wrong when solving the problems we face as Americans.

If there is one thing I want us to take away from this, we need to recognize the basic humanity in one another. There are lots of forces trying to drive wedges between us. Do not allow that. Build bridges. There is more that unites us.

I started writing this shortly after the 2020 election. This election served to highlight the growing differences in the U.S. along political lines, which reinvigorated my desire to write a book to reconcile those differences. I’ve had this idea a few times over the decades, and this recent election highlighted the need for me to try and reach out to both sides. However, these past few years have really hit a boiling point with some of the issues that have gone on, and it is time to learn to work together. I think that we have a lot to offer one another and including each other's ideas and concerns in the discussion is necessary.

Let’s start with a reminder; we have more in common than what separates us. Many of you have a shared history or bond with someone that disagrees with you. You know each other to be decent, hard-working, honest people. Some may rationalize this as thinking this person is not emblematic of the other side of the spectrum. You may joke and tease each other, but you still trust each other. Notice that you share a lot of the same values and have a lot in common; it’s just that you want to solve the problems faced by society differently.

If you do not have someone like that in your life, that is something that I want to focus on later in the book. Both sides have ways of maintaining their bubble of thought, some of which are the same, and some are different. Either way, they should be acknowledged so you can hear different ideas.

You should not lose friends just because they disagree with you politically. Now, I understand your concern that the other side is being portrayed in the media as being full of Nazis or Anarchists, and to be fair, there are plenty of those. But think about the people you know in your life that you disagree with, are they that way? Did you accept someone into your life that wants to kill everyone or burn everything down? Probably not. All because you disagree with someone on how to solve an issue does not negate the basic humanity within them.

I want to discuss this difference in viewpoints and opinions so you can learn more about the other side. I want you to remember that there are people that differ from you that you care about, and frankly, you can both be right at the same time. Here is where you can get the most work done to benefit everyone.

So what topics am I going to write about? Gun rights? Healthcare? Abortion? The Media? Yes. To all of it and a few more. Why? Because I see so many of us being manipulated around these topics, I want people to realize it. Because then we can move forward and work together to solve the problems.

Sometimes solving a problem starts with an uncomfortable discussion. However, we first need to realize that this is not a team sport where it’s Democrat vs. Republican. This is not a football game. This is not a situation where one team has to win and the other has to lose. We can all win.

Lastly, just a heads up, I will end each section with an ask. Each section will have a part where I ask you to do something to improve this discourse. Do not worry; you will not hate them all; at one point, I ask you to take your friends shooting so they can see how much fun they can have.

Chapter one

Profiting from Our Division

Initially, I didn't want to name who benefited financially or politically from dividing us, but the more time went on, the more I felt that was disingenuous. It is essential to know who would want to divide us and why. Therefore, we can hold these people accountable and do so appropriately. Plus, this means we can stop falling for their traps.

Because of the level of violence that has permeated the political sphere recently, let me be clear when I say accountable. We can hold them to the truth. Politicians can be voted out; they can be petitioned. You can change the channel, either literally or figuratively, from different media platforms. You can log out of social media platforms. It is this level of accountability that I