What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism

by Dan Rather

The responsible press has been hit with the ludicrous mantra of “fake news,” but I believe these insults will only strengthen journalists’ resolve.

But while these may be heroic times for journalists, the outcome of the battle between propaganda and deception on the

one hand and unbiased reporting on the other is far from clear.

No one has a monopoly on the truth, but the whole premise of our democracy is that truth...

Make no mistake: We are being tested. Without a vibrant, fearless free press, our great Am...

But tolerance alone is not sufficient; it allows us to accept others without engaging with them, to feel smug and self-satisfied without challenging the boundaries within which too many of us live.

Familiarity is a necessary ingredient for acceptance.

But there was one marginalized group for whom there was almost no sense of a path to progress. If you had told us back in the 1960s and 1970s that there would be legal gay marriage in all fifty

states, we would have bee...

You couldn’t ignore that there were women or African Americans in society, but you certainly could ignore the presence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, who most often were closeted.

The very theoretical idea of someone “like that” living in your neighborhood, let alone teaching your children, was seen as a perverted threat to society. It is hard now to think back to how much this malignant ideology crossed almost all political, religious, racial, and gender boundaries.

The key, I think—and it is not a novel or original idea—is that our progress with LGBTQ rights is due to greater inclusion with the rest of society.

We know that homosexuality is not limited to any race, religion, or socioeconomic class—it is part of human diversity. Once people had the courage and support to come out of the closet, families across the country, rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban, were forced to confront what had long remained hidden: sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, best friends, coworkers, even fathers and mothers, turned out to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and transgender.

In that moment I understood the courage it must have taken him to tell me this, and the energy he must have had to expend over the many years we had known each other to keep this central part of his life hidden.

How can people be so blinded by prejudice as to not see the common humanity?

Inclusion on race has been a very different journey, and I worry that for all the progress we have made, we are stuck in the purgatory of tolerance.

We have of late seen evidence of a great racial divide that remains, and in some ways even appears to be expanding, more than a half century after the major legislative victories in the civil rights movement.

The long shadow of slavery, segregation, and racism still looms over this nation.

What lessons are we teaching our children? We may support social programs that we think help those who are disadvantaged or who have faced

discrimination, but if we do not fully engage in a spirit of inclusion on a personal level, we are failing. We live largely separated from one another, and most people seem to be okay with that.

The more we are around people with a variety of life experiences, the more we can understand and value the needs and worth of our fellow citizens.

But inclusion, not assimilation, should be the key concept in seeking, ever seeking, a more perfect national union.

Our nation is bound together more by ideals than by blood or land, and inclusion is in our cultural DNA. We should feel proud that we are not all the same, and that we can share our differences under the common umbrella of humanity.

we must confront the voices of intolerance and come to terms with our own complicity in condoning ...

Our family home was on Prince Street, on the extreme outer edge of what was the Houston of the 1930s. It was more of a big town back then, not yet really a city.

passel

We understood that, in life, some are dealt aces, some tens, and some deuces.

“We do not feel sorry for them,” my mother said sternly. “We understand how they feel.”

It is perhaps not surprising that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan looked at a nation so traumatized and felt they could defeat us.

When we live in a self-selected bubble of friends, neighbors, and colleagues, it is too easy to forget how important it is to try to walk in the shoes of others.

We have more in the ranks of the extremely wealthy, many fewer in the middle economic class, and a larger pool falling further and further behind. So we grow more isolated and less empathetic. The threads stitching our union together begin to fray.

We see others, but we cannot imagine what their lives are actually like.

We ...

even think we should have...

Dividing people and stoking animosity can pave a path to power

One often finds the greatest lack of empathy in those who were born lucky.

The incredibly successful investor Warren Buffett once speculated to a group of students about what would happen if, before birth, a genie gave us the opportunity to choose the political, economic, and social system into which we would be born. “What’s the catch?” he said. “One catch—just before you emerge [from the womb] you have to go through a huge bucket with seven billion slips, one for each human. Dip your hand in and that is what you get—you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or disabled, born black or white, born in the U.S. or in Bangladesh, etc. You

have no idea which slip you will get. Not knowing which slip you are going to get, how would you design the world?”

It is a wonderful thought experiment that lays out a provocati...

Now, take a moment to imagine the most sanctimonious of our current national voices. Imagine those who lecture most loudly about morality and personal responsibility from the perch of privilege. Imagine those who blame the victims of discrimination and poverty. How...

These people are in dire need of humility, a humility bathed in the refres...

Too many times the term “American” has been used as a weapon against new immigrants, especially those who look, speak, or pray differently. And yet one of the noblest ideals of our country is that anybody from anywhere can be an American.

And it was present at the baptism of a nation that proclaimed “all men are created equal” but defined many men as three-fifths of a whole, never mind women of all races.

Its ranks were driven largely by anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiments. The ugly echoes of their intolerance can be heard today, and it is ironic that some who question the “Americanness” of more recent arrivals are themselves descendants of those who were labeled “un-American” in the nineteenth century.

Johnson framed the bill in rousing language: “[The old system] violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. . . . Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide.”

soaring rhetoric,

“by 2055, the U.S. will not have a single racial or ethnic majority.”

Those who wished to bar the Eastern and Southern Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the Catholics, the Jews, and now the Muslims and so many others have all used some version of the same argument: America will no longer be America. They have always been wrong. We have attracted some of the best scientists and inventors and entrepreneurs and artists and athletes and every other category you can think of because we are a place where people of all kinds can be Americans.

We should not succumb to bigotry, but we should also have empathy for those who are worried about their future.

The patron saint of the modern conservative movement made the case for a concept that today would have him pilloried by the right-wing press and those cynical politicians who have learned to exploit division for their own electoral success.