Let's talk

Today I am a tiny bit grateful that I live in Massachusetts, because in one sense, I don’t feel alone. Everywhere I went today – the coffee shop, work, Jamie’s school – sad faces were all around. At least here, there is a clear shared sense of the stunning, disheartening and, frankly, scary electoral event that has occurred. We are all fearful for the future now, in a way we wouldn’t have been had things gone the other way.

But that superficial connection with everyone – the flipside of the post-World Series shared-but-superficial joy -- belies a profound emptiness at the center. This election has crystallized for me the vital gap in my life and, I think, in the collective lives of so many of us on the left. I am missing, we are missing, a clearly articulated moral vision. One thing I know about all of you who are receiving this email is that you have a very strong sense of right and wrong. Most of you live out that sense every day in your paid work, your volunteer efforts, in the ways you live your lives. But we never talk about our values, apart from noting how superior they are to those other folks’ values. We rarely if ever talk about the principles underlying our actions and beliefs. We rarely share the sources of our strength and determination and clear-mindedness.

In this, we are very different from the folks on the right. We have to be honest about this election: The key was not the money spent, or the media maneuvers, or any of those grand political schemes and themes. The key was this: a significant number of Americans – a majority, apparently – tap into and feel a kinship with the President’s brand of moralism and Christianity. And they are not afraid to say so, and to talk with one another about their values, especially when they take the form of faith and prayer.

We, on the other hand, are silent. We allow a vacuum to exist in which the right makes a credible claim to having cornered the market on values. We spend an enormous amount of time and energy rolling our eyes dismissively at the religious right and patting ourselves on the backs for being so morally and intellectually superior to “those people.” We have spent little or no time actually articulating our own competing positive moral agenda. As a result, they are the only ones who get heard in the virtual public plaza. And we become the ones supposedly lacking a moral vision.

And yet, we have one. We have these shared principles that make it clear to us all that, for example, the war in Iraq is wrong, that all people deserve decent healthcare, housing, wages, that women must have access to safe and legal abortion, that equal rights for gay people must include marriage, that the state should not be in the business of putting people to death. From the environment to the economy to foreign policy to social issues, you and I probably have at most minor disputes about strategy and policy and occasionally positions, but not about the underlying values. And we on the left spend a lot of time hashing out those minor disputes, and almost none clearly articulating our shared beliefs about right and wrong.

I think this is where the organized left has gone wrong, and I am tired of waiting for them to figure it out. I am tired of waiting for some national figure to emerge who will eloquently delineate the new left agenda, values and vision. I am tired of waiting for the Democratic party to figure out that it is principles, not positions, that motivate people. And I am tired, period. Not just because I was up late last night, but because it is hard hard work to continue to live out these principles every day in the face of the right’s attacks. It is hard work to imbue Jamie with our values while the surrounding culture tries so hard to strip those same values away from him. I want us to find new ways to support one another in all this hard work. I want your help. I want to help you.

I want to hear from you how you think about your basic ethics and principles.
I want to know how you find the strength each day to live them, about your sources of support and strength.
I want to talk about our questions, doubts and fears as we go forward in a world that is awash in violence and evil.
I want to talk about – but not debate in some win-or-lose way – the differences among us, in order to hear each other better and to figure out what we each really believe.

In a word, I think the answer is us. We have to begin talking about that vision, about the values that unite us. We have to talk about principles and morality as good things again. Because we all feel them, and deeply. We just don’t talk much about them. And that silence is, well, you know, death.