How Divided Are We?

Dec. 26, 2024 Editor, The News-Gazette: When we move into 2025 will we carry the usual unnecessary baggage? It’s called conventional wisdom. It claims that this once fair land is so polarized, so divided by extremists that it is Humpty Dumpty. There’s just no way to put the “United” back in the United States. Merriam-Webster seems to agree; “polarization” is its word of the year.

Nevertheless, there were four men who never went along with this Humpty Dumpty talk. They were four insiders, four U.S. senators. Their names: Orrin, Edward, Bernie and John.

Orrin was from Utah. He spent 42 years away from the desert country to tell us there is light at the end of the health care tunnel. Edward was from Massachusetts. However, everyone called him Ted and called his brothers John and Bobby. It was said that Orrin and Ted were able to finish sentences the other had started, not because their views were the same — just the opposite. Being poles apart provided the clarity to allow getting to the heart of the issue. Think of Hatch and Kennedy getting together as two Irishmen, Reagan and O’Neill, without the usual refreshments.

As for Bernie, the socialist from Vermont and John, my hero from Arizona, both knew what was at stake: If they failed to reach agreement the Veterans Administration might go under. Yet their starting positions were poles apart. Bernie: Keep the VA hospitals open; John: Shut them down. And their final answer: Keep the hospitals open, but no more long waits, pay for a vet to go private.

How was this possible? There was a routine: Broadcast your poles-apart views to satisfy your constituents. Then close the doors and work out a deal that allows both to be equally unhappy. Our next president calls it, “The Art of the Deal.” Think of tariffs. Sure, we are divided at times. But not enough to break up the Great American experiment of 248 years. After all, there’s been only one civil war.

DAVID REYNOLDS Rockbridge County