Have you seen those Voices letters from people wanting me cast out of the country because I criticize a president they support? I only hope they don't own restaurants where I might choose someday to try to dine.
The term "culture war" refers to the stark and angry differences in the way people set their values and choose to live.
It's a war that currently escalates rapidly in America. It threatens to explode into full-fledged political hatred. It could render this former paragon among nations not merely divided by opinion, but torn apart by hostility, disdain and an inability to abide each other.
The underlying greatness of the United States has been its shared values grounded in high ideals that transcend the organized disagreement provided by our two-party political system.
The greatness erodes if the values become so aggressively different, so angrily polarized, that the ideal is severed into shard and shrapnel.
The rapid escalation has occurred mainly because the current president--preposterous, Russian-endorsed and second-place in the popular hearts and minds--is a child and demagogic disgrace who spreads lies, coarseness and vulgarity.
By the cynical calculation of preserving his base, he purposely stirs his grandstand into fear and loathing of those not in it.
As a result, some people who wouldn't be caught dead in that grandstand find that they can't merely disagree with and resist this abomination, but that they abhor him in a way that is both visceral and their own principled calculation.
Their principled calculation is that America cannot survive and remain great while acceding to the notion even for a day that this guy, in any way, is normal or acceptable.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders comes out in public a couple of times a week--if that anymore--and seeks to make Trump seem normal, even noble or great. And many people abhor her viscerally as well for her soullessness and the damage to the country's ideals from what she chooses to do for a living.
Now we learn from Lexington, Va., that Sanders and her party couldn't be indulged Friday evening by a restaurant owner and wait staff for 90 minutes, maybe, of paid-for professional service.
Go away, the owner told her, because--essentially--we can't stand the sight of you.
But I must ask: How can America stand for freedom in the world if our own domestic freedom to sit and pay for dinner is at risk?
I hear many of you saying that this dire current circumstance exceeds simple differences in political views. This president is evil, and his agents advance that evil, you say. I suspect some of you are invoking acquiescence to fascism in Germany.
I'm not asking you to consider this president anything other than what your reasoning and sensibilities command. I'm not asking you to get out of the street and stop protesting. I'm not even asking you to quit shouting at the Homeland Security secretary as she tries to sit for a Mexican dinner.
I'm asking only that you assign your best wait person--the one most able to hold his or her nose and serve a plate of food at the same time--to extend your professional service to a paying customer regardless of the depth of your political disapproval.
I'd support that wait person's writing a personal note on the ticket, in an exercise of glorious American free expression, perhaps saying something to this effect: "Please know, Mrs. Sanders, that I was happy to serve you this evening, because it's my job, but that--at risk of reducing my gratuity, a small price to pay--I feel an obligation to tell you that I believe you should be ashamed for the harm to our great country caused by your representing the behavioral disgrace that is, tragically, our current president."
That would have put the onus on Sarah. Would she fork over 20 percent or more in a tip? Would she hand the check and her credit card to her server, smile and say, "Thank you for expressing your opinion and I'll be back the next time I'm in Lexington"?
That very kind of exchange--indulgence, free expression and gracious response to criticism--would qualify as really making America great again.
Speaking personally, a man needs to remain free in this country to think mildly left-of-center while reserving the right on occasion to eat outside the home in a decidedly right-of-center way.
Arkansas' fried catfish and dry-rub ribs may be cultural-right food by stereotype. But they're brain food for me.
I need them to fire these synapses and keep this left-of-center wisdom flowing.
Even if you want me deported, please feed me and take my money until I am.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/26/2018