The first Holly Day is Unity. How ironic is that in America at the end of 2016? Our bubbles seem to be drifting further and further apart. As Hannah Arendt and others observed, some of what allowed the Nazis to take over Germany was liberals trying too hard to be accommodating to an ideology they disagreed with and knew was based on false premises.
I am so torn between the path of fierce resistance and the path of reconciliation. Of democrats becoming the obstructionist party of no, of the further vilification of our fellow citizens. This may only deepen the divide and drive the bubbles even further apart, but if it is the only way to prevent a totalitarian regime from forming, the lack of unity is warranted.
The opposite idea of giving them a chance and standing by as watch dog, of taking the high road, is morally appealing. And finding common ground with our fellow citizens is certainly a proven way to reconnect the body politic.
A house divided against may not be able to stand, but neither can one consumed in flames. We are at a critical nexus, which now divides us even within what were once homogeneous tribes. It is surely not going to be easy, but my take is that we need to struggle for all the unity we can muster, at the same time that we remain ideologically stalwart, especially when it comes to clear realities like climate change.
This of course means that conservatives and libertarians will be stalwart as well, and will defend their ideas about big government, and the power of the market. The optimal path likely lays somewhere between our ideologies, and the genius of the sort of democratic system we have evolved is its ability to iterate the influence of these competing ideas, and chose complex and nuanced paths based on empirical success.
So I think too that we need to try to pop the bubbles, avoid falling in line either behind ideas we know to be false just for the sake of getting along, or jumping on the bandwagon of every meme that confirms our biases. We need to be courageous and stand up to these urges in ourselves more than we need to stand up to who we define as the other.
So on this first Holly Day lets try to find whatever ways we can to regain some of the unity we have felt in the face of common challenges. Remember that we are all one people and always will be, that it can and should be a positive-sum game, with the success of any one of us leading to success for all of us, and disagreed with each other as siblings might, still members of one family.
HOLLY DAYS 