By Chris Satullo

America has deep problems. This has been underlined in recent days – vividly, bloodily, heartbreakingly.

Having hung around this country for nearly seven decades now, I can think back to other times when the cascade of news felt this bruising, this grim. But here’s what’s agonizingly different this time: Never before have the headlines left me with such a sense of dread that, no, we won’t find our way out of this, not this time. That we don’t know how. That we don’t have the unity or will or kindness to do it. That too many of us don’t even want to try.

I am as gutted as you are by what happened in Uvalde this week. I am as rageful as you at the chronic failure of our elected leaders to do even the first step of what’s necessary in response to such preventable massacres.

I’m as scared as can be that the next federal election will be the last genuine election I’ll ever get to vote in, that anti-democratic Trumpists will use this fall’s vote to maneuver themselves into position to just declare their pets the winners of all future votes.

I’m appalled at the disingenuous radicalism of the Supreme Court majority, as it works to dismantle a century of progress on multiple fronts in service of its false, ahistorical legal ideology.

I’m aghast at the sins and hypocrisy of the Southern Baptist Convention, as it apes the worst moments of the Catholic Church in response to its own horrific plague of sexual abuses within its ranks.

And I’m frustrated to tears by the ineffectuality of my team, the Democrats, as they fumble their response to all this, setting up a return to power by the people who have done and will continue to do very bad things. When will Democrats stop getting mired in dumb fights fueled by the narcissism of small differences, stop insulting and annoying the very voters they need to win over?

But what I’d like to do now is talk about the problem beneath all those problems.

Which is us. Americans. And our relentless habit of dividing Us into Us and Them.

The problem beneath the problems is this:

Their idea of Us – and our idea of Them.

You can’t fix anything about this nation, let alone bring about the beloved community or build the city on a hill, if you view half of the people with whom you must do that work as ignorant, obnoxious, hopeless, devoid of values, even actively evil.

Sure, many in MAGA World can sometimes seem ignorant, act obnoxiously or display breathtaking hypocrisy, wrapping themselves in the flag while they stomp upon the very ideals that have made this country something special in the history of the world.

But most of those who vote Republican are not hopeless and certainly not evil.  They are regular people who sometimes are – as we to the left of center can also be – confused, blinkered, selfish, hypocritical. They can get trapped mentally and emotionally in the dark hall of mirrors and shadows built by the digital and broadcast media of the right.

Here is what one conservative columnist said last week in the wake of the Texas horror: “Leftists hate our rights because they hate us.”

Believe such nonsense and the gun issue stops being about dead children or commonsense measures. It becomes a key tendril of the choking, bogus culture war fomented by right-wing partisans. And sane dialogue becomes very challenging, if not impossible.

But what’s our response? If we talk about people who cherish gun rights as though we despise them, we just fulfill their prophecy and justify their own contempt and intransigence. If we sincerely want to end gun carnage, then our expressions of contempt for ordinary people who disagree with us are self-defeating.

Perhaps first, in preparing to attempt the gun conversation again, we should admit that we to the left of center have our own silos, our own well-paid machines of confirmation bias of which we would do well to be more skeptical.  

No, I’m not equating the decidedly tinted world view of Rachel Maddow or the Times op-ed page with the bald-faced, toxic lying of a Tucker Carlson or Charlie Kirk. 

I’m just cautioning us that Q-Anon, Stop the Steal and replacement theory are warnings about where it can lead when you stubbornly stick to your information silo and believe everything that the most partisan people on your team say about the other side.

Let me urge you to ponder well for a moment exactly how it feels when you catch a snatch of the insulting epithets and sneering claims that Carlson or Sean Hannity or Ben Shapiro hurl at people like you, me and our friends.

It’s infuriating, right? It’s stupefying. It makes you want to shout, “How dare you?  You don’t know me at all. You don’t know anything about how I live my life, raise my children, do my work ethically, uphold my community. How dare you mock my values, question my right to vote, to even be called a real American?”

Then, check yourself for a second. Think about the times – in your anger at what “the other side” has done and the picture that they paint of you – when you’ve said things about other Americans that were judgmental, insulting, hyperbolic, self-righteous. Things that were based not on any real personal knowledge but on stereotypes promulgated by the media in which you marinate.

Try to think of someone – I hope you know at least someone – who regularly votes the other way, but whom you know to be a decent sort, a good person to have in the next cubicle or across the backyard fence, someone who’ll always jump start your car or lend a tool, who organized the GoFundMe for the fellow at work whose kid came down with that disease, who initiated that great conversation that one time, who does not deserve to be summed up by a couple of clever insults you heard from some panelist on MSNBC.

Think how that person might feel when they hear themselves, their actions, their motivations, their values misdescribed recklessly and unfairly – the same way yours so often are on Fox News.

Is reducing them to stereotype going to make them feel warmer and more open to you and your views? Is it going to leave them ready for a fresh conversation about what we should do about guns, or inequality, racism, our boiling planet, our struggling schools?

Or is that going to make them feel angry and resentful, less inclined to reach out, more receptive to the distortions and lies on offer from people with whom they at least share some political or tribal identities, people who actually seek their vote, who don’t treat them like the worst people every to stain the surface of the planet?

Yes, their idea of us is often unfair, hurtful and infuriating. It’s hard to take.

But so, then, sometimes is our idea of them.

In an America that is so evenly but grievously divided, the only way to get any big things done is to find a way to sit down with most reasonable people from the other team, to offer them respect, an open mind and, if need be, apology for past hurts.

Let’s never forget: To get done the things we seek, we’re going to need some of their votes. Progressive fever dreams aside, there’s no way around that fact.

So, we must prepare to listen, really listen, to how the world looks from where they sit. We’ll have to be open to fresh ideas or new formulations of old ones that have some chance of getting to 50 percent plus one. We’ll have to accept that getting something important that we want is far better than stamping our foot and futilely demanding that everyone see the world just as we do.

Yes, their idea of us is a big part of the problem. But, sometimes, so is our idea of them.

Someone has to go first, to take action to break the toxic cycle before its momentum becomes irreversible and fatal. We’re the ones who pride ourselves on being tolerant, forgiving, rational. So, damn it, it’s going to have to be us who goes first. 

What in the name of God – and in the memory of all the innocent lost ones – are we waiting for?

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia