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I listen to music or “books on tape” while drawing. I have just finished listening to the BBC’s radio production of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. While obviously more sparse than the 1200 or so pages in the print version, Sibley and Bakewell’s version captures much of the spirit of the original. As is my wont, I see this radio play through the eyes of my worldview - Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm.
Foster Harmony is the first and dominant tenet of Distilled Harmony, so it is not surprising that I was drawn to its manifestation in this version of The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn, who is eventually revealed as the rightful Lord of the Rings, and “King” of Middle Earth, performs all kinds of heroic deeds of arms, slays an amazing array of evil doers, orcs, nazguls; you name it, he “smote” them! But interestingly he is not completely accepted as the true King until he demonstrates his ability to heal Eowyn, the shield maiden who slew the King of the Nazguls at great personal harm because - like the first tenet of Distilled Harmony, Foster Harmony, “the hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known.” The ability to heal is of far greater import than the ability to harm, and hence one who claims the kingship must demonstrate the ability to heal.
Back in 1776, we decided that the will of the people was of greater import than the will of any king, hence he or she who would stand for the people must manifest the ability to heal. And now, perhaps more than any time in our nation’s history - save perhaps the Spring of 1865 and the ending of the Civil War - we stand in need of healing. Somehow we have come to see those whose political views differ from our own not as “the honored opposition” but as enemies whose will must be thwarted, whose every assertion must be declared some type of falsehood.
President-elect Biden has declared his intention to heal the corrosive divides that threaten the very notion of democracy - also put in place back in 1776. That is certainly a welcome change from the discordant confrontational style emanating from the White House over the last four years, and is still capturing and poisoning the media's attention today.
However, unlike Aragorn's mythic powers, this is a task beyond Biden's welcome declaration. As I have said before here on The Wall, fostering harmony is an individual, not a governmental, task. You cannot legislate compassion, gentleness, caring - you cannot mandate harmony. So while the government can, and hopefully will after January 20th, put forth policies that ease the path to fostering harmony; a broad cultural manifestation of harmony, of goodwill towards all is a task each of us must shoulder individually.
Perhaps the best first step is a sincere attempt to purge both our overt language and internal self-talk - and so hopefully our attitudes - of the "Us versus Them" mentality that has increasingly poisoned our public discourse. "Those Democrats" "Those Republicans" "Those neo-nazis" "Those black militants" "Those Latinos" "Those Immigrants" and, of course, the more virulent versions of all those labels, are the sad reflections of the linguistic norms that further and deepen the "Us versus Them" divide. Perhaps if we self-edit our reflections and our language, we will begin to reign in the currently common cultural inclination to fail to see individuals and see individuals only as members of groups, and often to see the group as part of "Them."
So while Biden's declaration of healing, of changing the idea of red and blue states into united states, is a welcome, and hopefully welcoming, relief from the years of anger, confusion and confrontation emanating from the fragmented seat of government, it is not enough. Each of us, in our language and behavior, must become welcoming and open to compromise, for only then can we claim to truly foster harmony and open the path to healing.
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