Dispatch from the deep divide
As of the very early hours of Monday morning, I was not supposed to write this sentence. A few minutes before, my roommate, Barrett B. Jackson ’06, had loudly called off our public experiment in political discourse, not to mention our private attempt at maintaining a close friendship despite partisan difference.
“Well, you can do whatever you want,” she said, standing in the door of my room. “But I’m going to be really mad if you write it.”
The night had begun innocently. I stayed at home, trying to heal from a bad cold. Barrett got back with hours enough left to read what else I’d been up to: I had posted a New Republic article on an e-mail list to which we both subscribe.
She read the story. “Isn’t The New Republic a liberal magazine?” she asked, shouting across the thin passageway that separates our rooms.
“Well, it supports Democratic principles and generally leans left—but they did endorse Lieberman,” I said. “Still, that doesn’t mean their facts are wrong!”
She shook her head and walked to the bathroom.
Two years ago, Barrett Beatrice Jackson lived across the hall from me on the second floor of Straus.
She was a Red State girl with a penchant for Bible studies and heavy makeup. I was an East Coast public school kid with secular parents and a socialist bent. Aside from my father, who registered with the G.O.P. every year “to vote against the crazies [read: the religious right],” I’d never met a real Republican before, not to mention a member of the religious right. These people existed for me mainly in legend, caricatured to the point that, had Barrett pasted a Swastika on her wall next to her Degas posters, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
Our moment of truth came very late one drunken freshman night in the bowels of the Straus C staircase. Like many freshman entryways, ours was torn apart by drama so petty that when it made us bawl we had to cry all over again just thinking about how stupid we were. On this night, Barrett and I happened to have a shared enemy.
Revealing the secret of our mutual dislike brought a pleasurable shock I imagine might only be equaled by learning I actually have a deep spiritual bond with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
We were friends from then on, a reality that meant I would spend long hours asking her questions like: “So, you believe in God. Tell me about that.”
During our sophomore year, I slid for unknown reasons into a brief depression. Walking into my room to find me sobbing with nothing to be sad about, Barrett cuddled up in my bed with me and talked to me about the importance of faith. I surprised myself by liking it.
As Sunday turned into Monday this week, I walked into Barrett’s room and brought up the New Republic issue again.
“Why do you refuse to accept facts on their face value?” I asked her. “The stuff in here is just a fact. It’s true. The analysis you can ignore, but why don’t you at least accept the facts?”
She said she doesn’t believe that it’s necessarily true, that my understanding of what constitutes “the facts” is hampered by my political perspective.
“We’re never going to agree. You’ll never change my mind, and I’ll never change yours,” she said. “There are just fundamental principles that we’re never going to agree on.”
She was assaulting everything I believe in. The possibility of rational discourse leading to mutual understanding is one of the principle premises of my academic and spiritual life. I was not ready to give it up.
So I turned her into my enemy, and once again we were shouting.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Barrett. If you had the right information, then you would realize we can agree. But everything you say is based on distortion: Fox News, Bill O’Reilly—they don’t have the facts, they have propaganda,” I said. “You know what you are? You’re self-righteous.”
It turns out that in the Christian tradition, self-righteousness is a sin, and I had just delivered to Barrett one of the coldest insults she’d ever been dealt.
She was shocked, and she was losing respect for me fast. The problem was, I had already lost respect for her.
“I can’t believe you, Elizabeth! Do you really believe that your ‘facts’ are better than mine? That I’m just this ignorant Southern girl who doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about? I can’t believe you believe that. Look, just don’t write the article. We can’t write the article and we can’t talk about politics anymore. To be honest, I’m worried about the future of our friendship if this continues.”
It’s never good to hear your best friend tell you she’s worried about the future of your friendship. So I shut up and thought about what I had done.
Barrett was standing on one side of my long futon, about to turn around in frustration and retreat to her bed and the blissful ignorance of sleep. I was standing on the other side, wringing a red sweater in my hands and trying to figure out why we had fallen from grace.
“I’m sorry. You’re right,” I said. “Please don’t go.”
It took us another hour to calm down, but we did. We went over the lessons of the night together. Respect, we emphasized again and again. I needed to respect Barrett. I couldn’t call her names, assume our differences stemmed from her ignorance and my enlightenment, assume that I am unconditionally right and she the constant enemy of truth.
We were calmer as we sat on my bed together, looking over a sourcebook on Arab culture, examining a single set of facts and coming to a single set of conclusions.
She may have won the moral high ground for the evening, but I felt like I came out with another victory. Given hard-to-achieve conditions, I told myself as I went to sleep at 4 a.m., mutual understanding is possible. It felt good to hear.