With police shootings, gun control debates, Colin Kaepernick and Donald Trump, it’s impossible to not have an opinion on the world’s most recent developments. But it seems the latest national fad in fallacious reasoning is our inability to agree to agree with each other.
If one person believes America isn’t great in matters such as immigration and economics, he is bound to have supporters across the nation. If another person believes America isn’t great on the grounds of its current racial affairs and the treatment of minority groups, he is also bound to have supporters.
It would be nearly impossible to get both sets of supporters to agree with each other on anything else, and most of their time is spent arguing over who has the right to draw this conclusion about the United States in the first place.
I believe the problem here is that people only want to be criticized on terms they are familiar with and agree with. In a way, it hurts when someone says something about them and their nation they didn’t expect to hear.
For example, a student who believes he possesses excellent grammar skills sends his paper to a friend for fact checking. That friend responds, “The facts are okay, but you’ve got a lot of grammar errors in this.” The student who wrote the essay, though he might not say it, will more than likely be a little insulted by this response. He could have agreed with his friend, had the friend responded with some edits to the facts of the paper, but grammar is not what he wanted to hear about, specifically when he deems this friend less qualified than himself to speak on the matter.
This same principle goes for American nationals. This nation is a salad bar. We can pick and choose problems to our heart’s desire and there are enough toppings for everyone to feast upon. Yet, for some reason, we are throwing the salads of other patrons to the ground because they didn’t dress theirs the same way we did. We forget that though they are unalike, their roots are the same. We forget to say, “Will you look at that! We actually do have something in common, don’t we?”
We don’t have to agree on everything, but let’s not let it go unnoticed when we do. If we could calm down, listen to each other, stop weighing our problems against one another’s and try to hear out people who hold beliefs different than our own, maybe we truly can get somewhere.
It won’t always work, but let’s not forget that we do have a starting ground — that we, in some way, do agree on something. Let’s build from there.
Jordan Marcell is a 19-year-old studio photography and linguistic anthropology sophomore from Geismar, Louisiana.