Celebrate Neutral Space

In America, a most endangered piece of social geography is "neutral space". Such places were plentiful in earlier (even relatively recent) parts of our history, and were important in affirming our common social bonds as Americans of whatever ethnic or religious heritage. Now the so-called "culture wars", polarized partisanship, hate-baiting pundits, and ideologically slanted journalism have fomented the illusion that there are two species of human rather than one in this country. Public education, higher education, religion, comedy, national news, modes of transportation, forms of energy use, government services, infrastructure maintenance have all become sharply politicized, but the records show that these were once areas of common agreement. People of different religious sects or faiths once regularly formed friendships and shared social engagements. Comedy acts once appealed to people of all walks of life because the humor dealt with common fundamental experiences. Everyone agreed we needed to have a decent tax base to provide adequate public education for all children to maintain a fully functional and democratic society, and to keep bridges, public utilities and roads safely maintained. Providing public transportation for the masses was a must. The news had to be about reporting what was really happening and journalists had an ethical responsibility not to pull their punches. Higher education had to be about the seven liberal arts if we were to maintain the cultural health of the nation and be competitive and communicative with scientific endeavors and technological improvements around the world. Religion was a personal not a political matter. Yes, citizens who identified themselves either as Republicans or Democrats both agreed on these matters once upon a time. You don't believe me? Just read the newspaper archives! So what remains in terms of shared social space for people to just be people in our insanely divided society? Well, there are three neutral spaces significantly remaining that immediately come to mind: national and state parks, public libraries, and spectator sports. All three of these spaces are opportunities today for people of different political viewpoints, economic classes and cultural experiences to share social geography and re-discover our common humanity. In these places people can pass the time of day, share a laugh, talk about their lives, offer courtesies, and engage in mutual appreciation of what the setting has to offer. In these places is the seed of renewal for broad spectra of our society in terms of re-establishing our common bonds, aspirations and basic humanity as Americans. We are fortunate to have these remaining neutral spaces, but for them to enable us to restore our unity and therefore effectiveness as a society, we need to step away from our computer or television set and get out and use these spaces.