Like baseballs in a batting cage, the controversies that divide us just keep on coming. Fast and unpredictable.
Last month it was the flap over the Susan G. Komen foundation and its move to cut financial support of Planned Parenthood. The resulting imbroglio dredged up deeply held convictionsamong Americans about women’s health issues and “cause marketing” that, in this case, has resulted in profits for companies promoting breast cancer awareness and research through pink and omnipresent product tie-ins.
This month it’s the Girl Scouts. Bob Morris, a state representative in Indiana, has created a kerfuffle by denouncing the Girl Scouts organization for “sexualizing young girls.” The campfire-building, cookie-selling sorority, he wrote in a letter to his state Legislature, “has been subverted in the name of liberal progressive politics and the destruction of traditional American family values.”
Next month it could be church bells, butterflies or baseball. There’s just no telling.
Do Americans disagree about everything? Are we such factious and fractious folks that we just naturally start arguing and choosing sides whenever something comes up? Are we always contentious, never content? Always warring, never loving? Have we reached such a pointed, poisoned, partisan point in our history that any topic, once it rises to the surface of national dialogue, triggers angry standoffs on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else?
In fact, there are things Americans agree about. We will get to some of those shortly. But, as professional mediators say about conflict resolution, before we can talk about the resolution we must first identify the conflict. And, phew, we’ve got an abundance of conflict in this country.
‘Warring Tribes’
Because we don’t teach children or adults how to advocate constructively, much less how to collaboratively resolve differences, we continue to become more polarized and dysfunctional.
– Rhonda Hilyer, conflict resolution specialist
Half of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, believe the country’s economic system is unfair. The other half disagree. Half of Americans think the nation “achieved its goals in Iraq,” CNN reports. Half of Americans, the Christian Science Monitor notes, think we should attack Iran to stop its nuclear program. Half of Americans, according to a just-released USA Today poll, say President Obama “is too liberal, and Americans are inclined to say they disagree with him on the issues that matter most to them.”
Oh, the president’s favorable rating at the moment? Fifty percent, of course….”
