The Real Reason We Don’t Get Along

We’re living backward.

Americans, they say, are ideologically and culturally split down the middle, just like that cheap pair of pants I foolishly bent down in that time.

Since the Founders, we have always enjoyed a lively back-and-forth exchange of ideas, but now it appears the division is becoming personal and permanent. We move to neighborhoods where we can avoid people who don’t vote like us. We stop being friends with people who don’t agree with us. We won’t marry them. We won’t join their clubs.

We won’t even go to church with them. Obviously, it’s important to worship only with other righteous, right-minded people. If you don’t know I’m being sarcastic, please find a different church.

Why the sudden need to choose sides? Well, it’s not sudden, and we should stop pretending it is.

Anyone who has ever been to school in America already knows what’s going on here.

We all just want to be sitting at the cool kids’ table.

Anyone who has lived through high school, with its finely curated matrix of coolness, will know what it’s like to wonder where we belong. When I passed through that time of trial, I remember understanding that each choice I made would further define the role I would be assigned.

Would I be social, athletic, academic, non-conforming, delinquent, or something else? Not self-assured enough for social status; a little too wild to go full-on nerd; too bookish for the outlaws — I was never sure. I like to think I was wise enough to see those categories as the false pigeonholes they are. But I still felt like a pigeon. An anxious pigeon.

Say what you will about the independence of spirit and Emersonian self-reliance, nobody wants to be picked last for volleyball. When you are one of the final few awkward candidates, all you can do is try to look nonchalant and a little taller.

But didn’t we outgrow all that?

Americans seem to be reverting back to adolescence en masse, displaying again all its attendant anxieties, tantrums, and nearly total self-absorption.

I mean no disrespect to adolescents, by the way. Undergoing that terrifying transformation and self-discovery is painful and complicated, and belonging to a group provides safety and camouflage.

I just wonder when the adults renounced their hard-won independence, since we still seem to be clumping together, like kitty litter around various ideological droppings. (I apologize for that image, which you now, perhaps, cannot unsee.)

And those six or seven ‘identities” have narrowed down to two cartoonish categories these days. We are flocking to the liberoprogressional clique or the conservatorialisticor cadre. And each of those two main camps shouts that they are the in-group, they are the cool kids, and somehow it is a matter of life and death.

Moreover, being part of the ingroup apparently isn’t enough to make us feel safe, so we devolve even further back than adolescence. Now, we are back on the elementary school playground with our friends and everybody else must be avoided because they have cooties.

Yes, that’s right. They have cooties.

If you have blocked out this particular childhood phenomenon, or have never heard of it, trust me when I say it’s a real thing. In the South, we called it “cooties,” and it’s a label and a condition that is damned hard to remove. It’s like voodoo. It’s not based on objective merit; rather, it is based on a chance aversion or an intuitive recognition of another’s momentary weakness.

Someone decides a child has cooties, and the selected child, like a classic scapegoat, is shunned and shamed until they can do something to pass the contagion along.

It looks a lot like the way we handle our current public leadership, doesn’t it?

We’ve all seen it happen, almost too swiftly to follow. Someone in public life is called out for doing or saying something untoward, and everyone piles on. The opposition spreads the word like wildfire; the media amplifies it; the loyalists defend and deflect. The only way the curse abates is when it is passed along to the next public figure who is caught with cooties.

And even if you have spent your whole life sitting at the cool kids’ table, once you catch cooties, that’s it. You’re out of the in-group, and it will take a long, long time before you get back in.

“Ah, but I was so much older then…”

Even with the best self-esteem in the world, and the most iconoclastic leanings, most people still want to be welcome in the human community. Paradoxically, we may reject society, but we hate it if society rejects us.

So it makes sense to me that even as adults, that adolescent fear of rejection might re-surface when we are feeling threatened by our daily life.

At least, that how it seems to work for me. I’ve noticed over the years that when my life is tense in the present, my subconscious can make it much worse by sending me back to school in my dreams.

In one such dream, I am naked and I can’t find my locker. In another, I am in the school play, only I’ve never been to a rehearsal and I’m just standing there onstage, without a script or anything, in front of — you guessed it — all the cool kids.

Both of those dreams speak to fears of exposure of inadequacy, feelings of being lost, of being asked to play a part I did not know.

If you were someone whose adolescence was smooth and pleasant, I suppose I am happy for you, but believe me when I tell you that even now, I probably do not want to hear it. I know you want to tell me about it anyway. (Puts fingers in ears… La la la la la…)

We’re not getting stupider. We’re getting younger.

Pundits and snobs like me have assumed that our country’s shrill, fact-free contentiousness only proves that we are all getting dumber and dumber. Now I’m not so sure. My latest theory — which I intend to test further — is that we’re just getting younger and younger — and not in a good way. We’re just not trying to be adults anymore.

We’re not growing up anymore; we’re growing down.

Maybe during the so-called modernist period, we had the illusion we were in control, and that we had really hit our stride as a species. But that didn’t last long. After a time, the coherent, modernist era unraveled into the postmodern deconstructionist plurality that scholars love and everybody else wishes would just go away.

I blame television, which first brought the world to our doors, nicely mediated by Walter Cronkite and Mr. Rogers. Once they left us, and cable and the Internet surged forward, that illusion of comprehension and control was shot all to hell.

It’s no wonder we want to return to the certainties of childhood, when learning was parceled out into neat curricular bites. I remember a child of my acquaintance complaining that he had to take geography in fifth grade. I asked why he didn’t want to take it, and he said, as if it were obvious, “Well, I learned all that in fourth grade.”

Nobody has that kind of certainty anymore, especially now that our phones know more than we do. No wonder we prefer to learn only the factoids that support our chosen worldview and no other.

But whatever others have experienced, I can only say for sure how reality has felt to me over the last few decades. It feels as if the world is now scaring Americans back into childhood, and we don’t even realize it.

It’s glittery and shiny but it’s dark and terrible; there’s sex everywhere, but we aren’t ever sexy enough; anyone can do anything they dream, but we alone are not living up to our potential; we can go anywhere we want but we are stuck somewhere with a family we can’t stand; when we do break free of our roots we are desperately lonely, and deep down we are afraid that no one will play with us, ever again.

So we gravitate to the strongest, most cohesive tribal identity we can find, and we say and do whatever we must for them to let us in. And then we can feel safe and comforted, certain we are finally sitting at the cool kids’ table, well away from the kids with cooties.

Longing for recess

In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be one of the cool kids. Some of those cool kids were actually transcendent, friendly, overachievers: smart, able to talk with anyone, forgiven for ruining the curve in all the classes because they were just so darned nice. In the movies, they would take the class outcast to the prom.

Perhaps they have become the people who get things done, in real life — the few people who are left trying to mind the asylum. Perhaps they may be found somewhere in the teachers’ lounge. We may occasionally hear their voices in the distance, like the lonely wah-wah of the trombone in the Peanuts cartoons.

But I’m afraid most of us are either huddled in the lunch room gossiping or out on the playground, planning to egg somebody’s car or dump pig’s blood on a kid with cooties.

And sometimes I’m afraid that those distant teachers, daily more radically outnumbered, may be losing control of the lunchroom, of the whole school. So who is in charge?

I think we all need to be grounded until we grow up.