Them!

Last week I had an unsettling email exchange with a stranger. A mutual friend had sent out an assessment of the Trump voter based on a lengthy exchange he had with one of his students who was a Trump supporter. I “replied to all” when I sent my response and soon received a follow-up from someone on the mailing list I didn’t know (and will refer to as MS here).  MS wrote: “I have highlighted your response below. Not as a direct critique, but to point out how even unintentional language takes on a divisive intent.” Here is my original response with his comments highlighted in red:

"Excellent…does a great job of trying to understand the Trump mentality (reference to "them") with as much charity as possible (indicates that they are beyond comprehension). In the end, however--and I hear this over and over again from my own encounters with these people--is this longing they have for the wrecking ball. How they got to this longing…what drove them to it is another question, but I think ultimately they reached a point where they just decided there was nothing to lose by blowing the whole thing up. And now, with the rest of us, they will pay the price for their civic tantrum." 

I have been writing for public consumption for a very long time, so I’m well attuned to the criticism that goes with the territory. But what made this critique particularly unsettling is that it echoed a frequent exchange that I’ve had with beloved daughter Gillian, especially over our past Christmas together. Gillian lives in Savannah and is surrounded by a goodly number of Trump voters. Whenever our discussions came around to politics, I invariably referred to such voters as “those people.” Then Gillian--like MS--would point how divisive that language was.
I’m not above self-examination, especially when there’s a convergence of criticism from someone who knows me as well as Gillian does and someone who doesn’t know me at all like MS. So I’ve reflected mightily on my use of the third person plural pronoun them/they, and a few observations emerge.
First, Gillian and MS are both educators and, I believe, about the same age…or at least they’re not of my age, so there could be both a professional and generational factor at play here. Educators today have probably been made far more sensitive to the harmful effects of language than we were when I was a practicing teacher. This sensitivity is often called political correctness, and I think I’ve been quite politically incorrect in expressing my disdain for political correctness at various times in The Nobby Works, such as here, here, and here. Not to beat on that poor dead horse again, but the winner of the past election--whatever his many damnable faults--at least understood how political correctness rubs many Americans the wrong way and running against it is a slam-dunk way to separate yourself from the weaselly-mouthed establishment types  in the ears of the voters.
Coincidently, the very day I received that chastising email about my use of the third person plural, my daily ration of The Simpsons served up a timely and delicious episode called "The Girl’s Code". In it Comic Book Guy is the token male on Lisa’s app development team, but he’s not allowed to sit with the female coders, because--as he explains-- “Everything I say offends them.” To which one of the female coders responds, “Who are you calling them?”
I admit that this theming of those we don’t like or don’t agree with…or don’t understand…adds a real strain to the prospect of eventual reconciliation. Moreover, it runs contrary to the entire ethos of The Nobby Works which, based on Norman O. Brown’s theory of Love’s Body, holds that we all once were part of a grand whole and what causes us so much earthly trouble and grief is our struggle to regain that wholeness while not losing our individuality. And so here I am in the that predicament myself. I really do believe in the ultimate commonality of human beings, but like most of us, I often find it convenient and preferable to put some distance between those who seem different…or deplorable…and myself…and thus I resort to “those people.”
As a writer I find it an almost necessary rhetorical device. First, from the standpoint of language clarity and style, calling, say, Trump supporters “those people” is both easier and more emotionally satisfying. It’s not only less cumbersome to call them "those people", but more accurate. After all, if I want to describe the awful outcome of the last election, it would be inaccurate to say, “We elected the worst person in the land as our leader”, because we did not--certainly not the we whose politics I share. Nor would it be accurate to say that, “America elected the worst person in the land as its leader”, because a sizable majority of Americans did not vote that way. Accuracy demands that there be a distinction drawn between those responsible for the action (them) and those not (us), otherwise analysis of an election—or any human activity—becomes impossible.

In the months to come, The Nobby Works will be drawing a lot from the book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and The Gap Between Us and Them, which discusses the differences between them and us in terms of different peoples’ moral dispositions. The cheap, inflammatory partisan rhetoric of the day about those who say, are “takers”  and those, say, who are “job creators” obscures real tribal differences…what the author Joshua Greene calls moral biases. It is not that “they” are immoral and we are “moral”, it is that their moral sense is different than ours. It’s deep and complex and necessary for us to understand this if we are ever to pull out of this death spiral we’re in to permanent division. Declaring that “them” should now be “the T-word” shoves those essential, inescapable differences under a rug and prevents us from getting to that understanding.