I’m driving down a gravel road in rural North Carolina, looking at mailbox numbers. A hospice social worker, I’m headed to meet Petey, a patient dying of metastatic cancer. When I’d called his wife Jackie to schedule our first visit, she’d told me they’d been married more than 60 years. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she’d said, her voice heavy with sadness. “I don’t know how I’m going to make it in this world when he’s gone.”
A few homes down I see a ranch style house with a Trump flag hanging limp from what looks like a homemade flagpole. Hell no, not that one, I think, before realizing the number I’m looking for is on a grey mailbox at a driveway leading to that very house.
My eyes harden with anger. A thought pops into my head that I’m not proud of. “Good, he’ll be dead by November. One less vote for that bloated orange fascist.”
As I roll down the driveway, my mind lights up with stereotypes about the people I am about to meet. Stupid. Gullible. Easily manipulated. Incapable of critical thinking. Racist. Willing to rationalize and/or cheer on violence against people they have dehumanized (Blacks, Muslims, people in the LGBTQ community). I assume they don’t give a damn about democracy and are likely to have negative judgments about progressive-minded people like me (I fail to see the irony).
I pull out one of the surgical masks my team are still wearing to protect patients from COVID and other respiratory infections. I imagine they’ll think I’m some stray sheep from the woke mob wearing my mask because I’ve been duped by the radical left agenda into throwing away my freedom or being foolish enough to believe in science rather than delusional rants by self-proclaimed experts on YouTube or hate radio.
Yeah, it’s quite a list. But it gets worse. Did I mention I’m not proud of this? I imagine Petey and his wife sitting around a massive television being programed like braindead Lemming as they’re fed emotion-laden narratives by Fox ‘News’ about the Biden crime family or ‘Illegals’ invading our Southern border with pockets full of fentanyl M&Ms intended for your child’s playground.
As my mind unspools these and other thoughts and images, and my blood pressure rises, I hear a familiar inner voice. Getting hijacked. This isn’t why I’m here today. I’m here to bring kindness and compassion to people who are suffering.
I’ve been doing this work long enough to know and trust this voice. I breathe slowly and visualize myself connecting with what I call ‘the Light’ which I believe is inside the people I’m about to meet – call it spirit, soul, life force, deep self, heart center, whatever you want.
Experience has shown me that the emotional and psychological pain of dying, or losing someone we love, is a common ground upon which we all gather, not as tribes, but as part of a larger human family. Ground upon which we can all lend each other a shoulder, regardless of which flags we fly.
When death approaches, it has ways of washing away things that are not particularly important. Deciding whether to wear one’s Trump mug shot tee-shirt or the one with a Confederate battle flag ceases to matter when a dying person is listening to grandchildren playing outside or holding a life partner’s hand.
Questions about whether Tim Scott would be a good running mate take a backseat to more serious questions – What kind of difference have I made in my life? Have I been a good parent and spouse? Did I live my deepest values? How can I let my children know that I love, have always loved, them even though I’ve had a hard time expressing this?
Who cares about Biden’s speech when your dying father is having a respiratory crisis and you need to accurately draw up the morphine dose as the hospice nurse gives you instructions over the phone? Or who gets credit or blame for the latest economic report when you’re preparing a life partner’s favorite meal, maybe for the last time, though you know she may take one bite and push it away because her dying body is no longer hungry?
Petey is sleeping as Jackie and I settle into chairs at his bedside. “He sleeps all the time,” she says. “I can’t get him to eat anything, and he has a hard time swallowing even a few drops of water. I feel like I’m letting him down by not getting more in him.”
Gently I explain how the body slows down when a person is dying. Increased sleep is normal, so is lack of appetite. As the end approaches, a person’s body no longer effectively metabolizes food, and the brain stops sending hunger signals. It’s okay that she cannot get him to eat. Pushing it would only cause discomfort and put him at risk for choking or aspiration. “He’s not dying because he's not eating,” I tell her. “He’s not eating because he’s dying.”
I’ve forgotten about the Trump flag. It’s just me, Petey and Jackie, her heart broken as she sits at the bedside of someone she loves. I notice Petey’s facial expression and respirations change when he hears her voice. I tell her that he can likely hear what we are saying. Even though the painful moment of separation is approaching, they are still, and will continue to be, connected.
I ask what he was like, where they met, what told her so many years ago that he was the guy with whom she wanted to spend her life? For the next two hours she laughs and cries, sharing memories and stories.
Their son and daughter hear the laughter and join us, encircling the bed in an impromptu story circle. A picture emerges of a man who worked hard, loved his family, and did his best to pass down values his wife describes as “living by the golden rule and being there for anyone in need.”
They tell me he always carried an extra set of mechanic’s tools in his truck. “More times than I can count,” his son Bobby smiles, “Dad would get home late from work, or what was supposed to have been a quick trip to the hardware store, covered in dirt and grease after pulling over to help someone on the side of the road whose car was out of commission.”
Later, as we walk down a hallway to the front door, Jackie pauses so I can take in dozens of framed photographs. It’s a visual autobiography of Petey, Jackie and their kids over the last 60 years. I pause to absorb images of them posing for photos or caught in the act of pulling in largemouth bass or holding pieces of homegrown corn on the cob. They look happy. They look remarkably normal.
I feel at ease in Petey and Jackie’s home. I like them. I enjoy being with them. They seem like good people. Not the kind of people who would support or make excuses for a violent insurrection during which police officers are attacked and injured. Not people who would commit or condone assault on women, Muslims, or those who are Latinx, gay or transgender.
Yet, from my perspective, they are guilty of supporting countless acts of cruelty and violence. Not to mention rejecting our nation’s commitment to an inclusive, multi-cultural democracy, in favor of an authoritarian fraud. Consciously or not, these seemingly good people support, deny, or minimize horrible acts of criminality and abuse when committed or sanctioned by tribal leaders, like Donald Trump, for whom they would likely twist themselves into pretzels making excuses.
It’s confusing. How can I enjoy the company of people who support a demagogue who defends himself from sexual assault charges by saying a woman is too ugly to rape? How can I sit here and laugh with people who are apparently just fine with a policy that rips kids from their parents’ arms and locks them away just because their family came looking for a better life?
Should I even be engaging with them? Does engagement mean I’m going along, looking the other way, rather than pushing back against lies repeated so often by right-wing politicians and media that people like Petey and Jackie actually believe them? Anchoring in my role as a social worker, these questions quickly move into the background, superseded by an imperative to bring comfort to other human beings who are suffering and afraid. In this moment, it really is that simple.
I think about the negative story I’d told myself about Petey and Jackie when I saw that flag dangling from what turned out to be a pole which Petey had shown his granddaughter, Beca, how to carve from a fallen red cedar.
I’d reduced them to a bundle of rigid, dehumanizing stereotypes before looking Jackie in the eye as she welcomed me into her home. I’d made assumptions that ruled out the possibility that she and Petey might be caring and generous human beings.
I’d felt justified in this, even a bit superior, by my anger. It’s scary how quickly this switch goes off these days, especially when the stakes seem so high. Scary how quickly anger turns into contempt.
Now, I see that my anger may have fueled a cognitive distortion or two. Or three. Cognitive distortions are patterns of thought, typically automatic and unconscious, that cause an inaccurate, negative view of situations, people, and/or events. These include things like jumping to conclusions; black-and-white thinking; negative mental filtering; overgeneralizing; mindreading (incorrectly believing we know what others are thinking, what their motives are); and emotional reasoning (believing that if we are feeling something, or if what we are thinking is associated with a strong emotion, it must be true).
After a couple hours in their home, the picture is more complex than one built upon my worst assumptions. I still believe Petey and Jackie are blinded by a dangerous trance state that allows them to support someone as vile as Trump – I’m not letting them off the hook just because they seem like nice people – but this trance state, dangerous and problematic as it is, is not the sum of who they are.
I know this not because I read an incisive analysis by experts on political polarization offering strategies for positive communication and conflict de-escalation. Or because I took a seminar on Rogerian techniques for building empathy and unconditional positive regard. I know because I knocked on the door. And I only knocked on the door because I had to.
Being a hospice social worker forces me to knock on doors whether I want to or not. To meet and better understand people, like Petey and Jackie, who challenge my stereotypes and allow me to see them as real, living human beings.
Hospice throws the doors wide open. It doesn’t matter how big or empty your bank account is, what God or gods you do or don’t believe in. It doesn’t matter who you love, who you hate, or whether you have a gold card or a green card in your pocket. It doesn’t matter if you wave a Trump flag or a rainbow flag. All are welcome.
In a nation where it feels like we are being divided into warring tribes, hospice encounters provide a place of peace where divisions momentarily dissolve within the solvent of shared emotional pain, reflections on what really matters, and bonds of love, however imperfectly expressed.
In a culture where we’ve been conditioned to stare and click rather than sit and talk, hospice provides a safe middle ground to shake ourselves from lethal obsessions with divisive social media and 24/7 news with its contrived urgency, profiteering, false equivalencies, and parade of pontificating pundits who pass opinion and bias off as analysis.
This profound human experience of coming together on common ground when someone is dying and sharing stories reaches back across the centuries. It places our lives in a larger, universal, context. Death gets our attention and shifts perspectives in ways that create a middle ground where we can connect as human beings without getting distracted by labels, at least for a time.
In the 1950s, psychologist Gordon Allport had something to say about the power of middle ground. He developed a simple hypothesis about how to heal polarization and conflict between groups holding negative views of each other. He said, basically, that when members of antagonistic groups begin to interact with each other, get to know each other as human beings rather than stereotypes, they develop meaningful relationships and have more positive views of each other.
Allport’s research focused on divisions driven by racist beliefs and negative racial biases, but his work has been shown to be relevant for reducing conflict and misunderstandings across a range of variables including differences in religious beliefs, age, socio-economic status as well as political polarization.
He believed that for interpersonal contact to foster positive change, it was necessary for these interactions to include a shared perception that the groups have equal status and a common goal. However, one meta-analysis looking at decades of research into Allport’s theory found that, although equal status and common goals can be helpful, “all that's needed for greater understanding between groups is contact, period, in all but the most hostile and threatening conditions.”
Journalist and author, John Blake points out that Allport’s insight runs counter to a widely accepted notion that what heals conflict between groups is the rational assimilation of information. Writing about racial divisions, Blake observed that “We venerate the power of facts. I assumed after George Floyd’s murder that if journalists kept presenting irrefutable evidence such as the Ahmaud Arbery video, citing history like the “Tulsa Race Massacre” and quoting authors dissecting racism’s role in forming America that a critical mass of White America would shift their racial attitudes.”
“Allport’s contact theory suggests that what reduces racial prejudice, though, is not more information. It’s sustained, intimate contact between White and Non-White people – he describes it as reaching “below the surface”— in mutual endeavors that have nothing to do with race.”
Sounds simple, right? Just get to know each other. Find common ground upon which we can interact; lower the rising temperature. But when I think about friends with whom my wife and I associate outside of work, they all identify as progressive. All of them.
Many are surprised, even incredulous, that we know people who support Trump, and that we have family members we love (and with whom we are still talking) who see the world similarly to the way Petey and Jackie do. Is feeling love for someone who supports Trump a betrayal of one’s commitment to social justice? If so, we are in very big trouble.
How did we become so polarized? Until Trump showed up, I don’t remember anything approaching our current epidemic of reflexively vilifying people with whom we disagree and slamming the doors between us. When did so-called leaders start raving like lunatics about civil war if they don’t get everything they want. Are we really that incapable of basic respect, empathy, and kindness?
I admit, part of me wants nothing to do with Petey and Jackie. Another part, the one from which that inner voice originates, knows that demonizing others only creates more division and conflict. However hard it is for me to understand, there are people who do not see racism and misogyny when they see a MAGA hat. That’s what I see, but Petey and Jackie are not consciously endorsing either.
Pete and Jackie do not consciously intend harm toward my friends who are gay or Black when they talk about going back in time to make America “great” again. But I bristle at this kind of encoded language that only sharpens the targets my friends have long had on their backs.
This lack of conscious intention is no excuse. As far as I’m concerned Jackie and Petey are guilty of going along with the vicious extremism at the heart of Maga politics if only through ignorance, apathy, or timidity. But attacking them, lecturing them, or slamming the door and labeling it: “Deplorables: Do not enter” only makes things worse. Only keeps me from seeing beneath the surface and catching unexpected glimpses of goodness inside of them and realizing there are places we agree, concerns we share.
So, how do we get out of this mess?
If I knew, this would be where I’d offer a few ‘top strategies’ for healing political polarization and pretend we are destined for a happy ending if everyone just reads and follows along. But I have no simple strategies, and a happy ending is not a slam dunk.
Blake likes to say that “facts don’t change people. Relationships do.” I think he’s right. I suspect if we are going to survive, we must talk with each other. And we must do more than talk, we must start connecting and building relationships, seeing beneath the surface, beneath our worst fears, assumptions, and anger. Even in, especially in, dangerous times like these.
We don’t need to compromise our values or accept things we find offensive. But if Allport is right, we do not serve our values by trying to shove them down people’s throats. If facts and a rational assessment of information changed people’s minds, MAGA would not exist. What matters is having the courage and curiosity to foster simple moments of connection, seeing each other as real, complex, human beings. Keeping the door open, even just a crack.
It’s easier for me as a hospice social worker. I have a built-in framework for connecting with people in the MAGA-verse. By the time I show up, the shadow of death has already cleared a path for my heart to reach theirs. No one cares about political debates. No one asks to see my MAGA membership card. They just want to know that I care.
The focus is not on what separates us, but what draws us together – caring for each other during times of loss and fear, sheltering each other, asking deep questions about what it means to be human, doing what’s right even though it scares us, whether it’s dressing a parent’s stage 2 bed sore or talking with one’s children about a horrifying new diagnosis.
Whenever I look beneath the surface, I discover that we are more alike than different. When I look at Petey’s Trump flag, I see cruelty, ignorance, and indecency. But when I look at Petey in his hospital bed surrounded by people who love him, beneath the surface, I see a decent man who did his best.
And it’s reciprocal. As I listen, express care, Jackie’s stereotypes about me begin to change. I’m no tool of the coastal elite out to take their guns or treat them disrespectfully. I’m not here to “educate” them about why their fear of certain books or critical race theory reflects ignorance and unconscious racism. I’m someone who cares about them as we share this fleeting journey of life.
But contact can stir inner tension. Tension between my commitment to the values of anti-racism, inclusion, and standing against those who support oppression, on the one hand, and practicing peace, kindness, and acceptance toward all people and animals I encounter, on the other.
This tension raises questions about my sense of identity. Am I the voice of anger when I see a Trump flag? Am I that voice of kindness at Petey’s bedside? Which voice requires more moral courage? Which will lead to a better world? Can I be both at once? If so, how do I pick my fights wisely while living by an imperative to be kind, avoiding the trap of building walls between myself and others? How do I, how do we, go beneath the surface?
Some will roll their eyes and think – “it easy for a White, cisgendered, man to sit back and say we should try connecting, his neck is not on the chopping block.” It’s true, I have a layer of insularity and protection between me and the kind of harassment, intimidation and abuse fomented and stoked by Trump and his ilk.
I can see Jackie rolling her eyes as well. “Oh, come on, man. Don’t act like your side is the only one bighearted and concerned enough to reach out to connect. I bet there have been times when it was clear that you were talking with someone on the other side of the fence, and they made a gesture of connection you didn’t see coming.”
That is true. Every time it has happened, I have been grateful and tried to respond in kind. These moments sustain me when I’m feeling especially cynical.
Of course, connecting requires that we feel safe and are treated with respect whichever side we are on. When this is not the case, connection may be a project for another day. There are plenty of MAGA extremists who promote, and seek provocation for, aggression and violence, who prey upon those susceptible to being sucked into a right-wing echo-chamber of hatred, conspiracy and paranoia.
I’ve met MAGA fans whose obsession with Trump approaches cultish levels, who seem incapable of having an opinion or Fox soundbite pop into their heads which they do not feel compelled to state as fact to everyone around, regardless of the context. I do not engage them with the intention of connecting beyond a superficial level. I’m sure it would be the same if I were to meet politicians, influencers, or media “personalities” who parrot and monetize Trump’s serial lies, and who intentionally fuel and benefit from these divisions.
But these groups are not the core of Trump’s support. It may seem they are when emotions run high, especially the way the media highlights these groups and overfocuses on conflict, emotion, simplification, and sensationalism (remember those cognitive distortions?). It’s easy for progressive-minded people to assume the whole MAGA world is full of blind reactivity and obedience to a power-mad sociopath ever playing the victim while spewing venomous lies and making threats about vengeance. From what I’ve seen, though, most are people like Jackie and Petey.
When Jackie and I reach the front porch, I tell her that Petey looks like he’s not going to be here long. His respirations are fast and shallow with period of apnea. He’s having reflexive breathing or what some people call the “death rattle” as secretions accumulate in his throat. His extremities are cool as blood no longer circulates into hands and toes. I review what to do if she needs the on-call nurse, and when he dies.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” she says. “I’m going to be all alone.”
I think about reminding her of her kids, siblings, and people at her church, but remain silent. Alone or not, that’s how she feels.
She reaches out and holds my hand, connecting. I ask what Petey would say to her right now, what would he want her to know?
She thinks for a moment then whispers, “He’d tell me to be a good person.”
“What would he mean by that?” I ask.
She smiles, “He’d mean to be there for others, and not be so hardheaded that I don’t let others be there for me when I’m hurting.”
We laugh together, then tears well up in her eyes. “You and Petey would have liked each other,” she says.
I feel a lump well up in my throat, and give her a gentle smile.
As I walk back to my car, I glance again at the lifeless Trump flag. This time it’s not anger and contempt I feel, it’s sadness.