I’ve been thinking all weekend about a trip we took down to Cincinnati several years back. At one point, we found ourselves gazing down at the Ohio River and discussing what it must have been like for brother to fight against brother during the Civil War. I imagined two brothers born in the same house in Cincinnati. One travels south, crossing the river into Kentucky for a job, and starts a family. Years pass, the political rhetoric heats up, and eventually the conflict breaks out across the nation. Suddenly these two brothers find themselves at war, with the mighty river serving as a symbol of the divide between them, and as a political border between their respective nations and causes.
While bloodless, our current election season has also been fiercely divisive. People who once stood upon common ground have found themselves gazing upon each other from the distant banks of a deepening ideological river. How fascinating that Ohio would become a perennial “battleground state” wherein the struggle between the conservative agrarian Southerners and the progressive urbanized Northerners for the future of the Union reenacts itself every four years.
There is some hope, I think, considering the Ohio River as a symbol of our political differences. While many a slave had been “sold down the river” into bondage in years prior, the river also came to stand as a symbol of manumission. At the narrowing of this river, many a slave was delivered into freedom by the Underground Railroad, and it thus became known colloquially as the River Jordan. So too it is now, that in the crossing of this divide, we may find freedom.
How then to cross the divide? By building bridges. Instead of isolating ourselves in our respective media bubbles (public radio and MSNBC vs. talk radio and Fox News) we have to reach out to those on the other side and really listen to why they believe what they do, without recrimination or demonization. Whoever wins the election tomorrow, we all need to do this. We’ve already seen what happens when we don’t.
