With All Due Respect: Defending America with Grit and Grace

by Nikki R. Haley

Winners do what losers don’t want to. I taped that fortune cookie message to my computer so I wouldn’t forget it. I started to go to places that were not necessarily comfortable for me, places where I knew people didn’t already support me. I discovered that when you go places that are uncomfortable for you, you grow stronger.

America is living through a time when our politics, media, and popular culture are exaggerating our differences, and weaponizing them. People talk about diversity more than ever, but too many of us are becoming intolerant in the name of tolerance. Instead of trying to understand those who disagree with us, we tend to write them off as not even fit to have a conversation with. Instead of focusing on the things that bring us together, too many Americans obsess about the things that separate us. We have to resist the forces that are pulling us apart, whether they are coming from the left or the right. Because it is our values—our belief that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness come to us from God, not government—that tie us together as Americans. It is in countries where these values are absent that tribalism and hatred flourish. We can never fail to make this case.

The Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel put it this way: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”

These days it seems like we’re going through growing pains. We judge too quickly. We don’t understand our brothers and sisters. Too often we don’t even try. Americans are passionate. We say what we think and we are strong-willed. That will always be one of our strengths. But at some point we need to take a breath. We need to remind each other that we have more in common than we have differences. We need to look at the person who disagrees with us and not see that person as evil but as someone who is a mother, a daughter, a wife, a friend, a professional, and an American.