Trusting our way to a truce

by David Benjamin

“When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen.”

— Former Secretary of State George P. Schultz

MADISON, Wis. — A lot of big guys think they’re dangerous just because they’re big. This was never true for John, one of my larger friends. In my early memories of John, I see him shambling the halls in high school, saying hello to everyone and treating all of us smaller people like long-lost cousins. 

John and I were never bosom buddies. We traveled in different circles when we were in school, but he always seemed glad to see me — God knows why — and I was always lifted a little by his warmth, openness and what Dickens called liberality. After high school, we took separate journeys, not renewing our acquaintance ’til decades later at class reunions. Nowadays, living just a few miles apart, we’re closer than we were when we were young. Although he doesn’t attend many meetings (now suspended indefinitely by Covid-19), he belongs to a group of barroom friends ironically referred to as the Steering Committee. 

Among my favorite snapshots is a slightly blurry photo that I took at a party. Big John, side-by-side with Alice, one of our high-school teachers, is grinning gloriously and redfaced from a combination of beer and blood pressure. The image is the ebullient essence of John, who can’t possibly have an enemy in the world. 

The photo also evokes what John and I have in common. Besides the aches, pains, extra weight and hypertension common to our age, we still love Alice — and our classmates — after all these years. Offspring of the mid-century working class, John and I harbor a mutual faith in hard work, personal modesty, kindness to strangers and family roots. Though we might not meet in the flesh for years at a stretch, we’re immediately conversant and comfortable when we do, because the qualities we liked and trusted in each other fifty years ago have not altered. John is still solid, true and emotionally generous. I’m still Benjie the Nut.

Trouble is, for the last four years, John is a fierce and occasionally outspoken supporter of the soon-to-be ex-president. I know this because John occasionally finds a snatch of right-wing propaganda or Trump worship on social media and “shares” with me. These spurious blurts of provocation tend to puzzle me because they’re out of character for a guy who, before, never picked a fights. However, I understand. John’s on my mailing list for weekly rants like this one. As a traditional Republican drafted into the Trump church-militant, John feels, I think, a sort of tribal imperative to retaliate against the detractors of his party’s messiah. 

When he forwards one of these Facebook jabs, I see it not so much as an attack as a taunt, sort of a raised fist after a touchdown.

This is what Trump has wrought. Though John and I have always pulled for the same teams — Badgers, Packers and LaFollette Lancers — we became arch-foes on opposite sides of a stadium built by a demagogue, flinging empty insults across a vast field where ignorant armies clash by night.

Recently, I suggested to Mark, another Steering Committee member, that it might be time to reconcile with friends like John. My model for this overture is my stepfamily, most of whom are the sort of true-to-your-school GOP voters who don’t think much about politics but stick with their team on Election Day, even if the quarterback is a sneering showoff who hogs the ball and kicks his opponents in the nuts when the ref’s not looking. With these folks, who are the salt of my earth, I willingly still the storm of political discourse in my mind and talk, instead, of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kale.

Mark, an activist Democrat, has discouraged me from seeking a similar, neutral middle ground with John. True to his own tribe, Mark dismisses John as a lost cause with whom accommodation is pointless. 

I can’t do that. There’s too much I like about John. Besides, I don’t think he’s going to spend the rest of his days in thrall to a sometime “hero” who’s already begun to fade into unpleasant memory. Republicans like John are reluctantly coming to terms with a transitional dilemma, forced to choose between an unsustainable cult of personality and a zombified conservatism.  Chances are John will bother with neither. Instead, I suspect, he’ll cleanse his choler, leave the political mishigoss to the blowhards Out East and go back to voting (or forgetting to vote) without thinking very much about it, which is what most of us do.

In the meantime, my dilemma — and America’s — is how to bridge an Us-vs-Them chasm that has widened and deepened so far that we fear a permanent rigid division in which no compromise or comity is ever again possible. 

I’m instinctively inclined to believe that well-meaning people will always find a way to reconcile. I found solace for this starry-eyed conviction in a Washington Post essay (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/11/10-most-important-things-ive-learned-about-trust-over-my-100-years/?arc404=true) by George P. Schultz, who has served in the Cabinets of three Republican presidents. In his essay, Schultz invoked a lifelong byword: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

Schultz offers examples of people with veiled or opposing views — soldiers at war, labor vs. management, Republicans and Democrats, Black vs. white, Reagan and Gorbachev — who have heeded the need to set aside their national, political, religious, ideological, racial, ethnic loyalties and sought a mutual path to solving problems. In such solutions, Schultz suggests, there is unity, even friendship.

Schultz ends with this: “Trust is fundamental, reciprocal and, ideally, pervasive. If it is present, anything is possible. If it is absent, nothing is possible. The best leaders trust their followers with the truth, and you know what happens as a result? Their followers trust them back. With that bond, they can do big, hard things together, changing the world for the better.”

Schultz’s message set me to wondering how a bleeding-heart liberal like me could forge a truce with a recovering Trumpnik like John. We have no great mission, like nuclear disarmament or school desegregation, to force our presence at the negotiating table. John and I can easily stay apart, opposed and tribal ’til we die, no longer at odds but no longer the friends we’ve been — once in a while shining a little light on each other — since tenth grade.

As I pondered this quandary, I thought of my grandsons, Augie and Aven. Since they live in Tennessee, I hardly ever see them. But I wondered, if I were to fly them here for a visit and, for some reason, needed someone to watch over them for a few hours, who would I trust with my grandchildren?

John.

I don’t know if John has grandkids, but if he does, would he trust me with them? Of course he would. The most precious people in both our worlds mean infinitely more to us than Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any three-word slogan. 

The internet bristles with photos of rabid Trump fans, holding profane signs, desecrating the flag, dolled up in MAGA hats and military camo, carrying AR-15s, screaming obscenities and storming the barricades of imaginary socialism. There’s an equal and opposite album of Black Lives Matter, Never Trump and Women’s March protesters cavorting similarly. But when I look closely at faces in these crowds, I can’t help seeing a lot of folks like John, or Mark, with whom I’m pretty sure I could trust — because we all come from the same towns, neighborhoods, street corners, schools, families, births, deaths and troubles — with my grandkids.

Maybe this is where we should start our journey back home, to America.