Category Archives: politics

Reconstructing Cancel Culture

History, politics, Pop Culture, Race

I hope you all are taking care of yourselves while we shelter in place. Hopefully, this post gives you a way to pass the time.

In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about cancel culture. Celebrities, politicians, and regular people have been “cancelled,” though it’s often unclear what that means. The best definition might actually come from Urban Dictionary. It defines “cancelled” as meaning “if you or anyone does something that’s considered ‘bad’… no one would look at you in a good way anymore, no respect, etc.” The consequences could include losing business, twitter followers, or votes.

For many, cancel culture is something woke young people have invented recently. Merriam-Webster claims “The idea of canceling—and as some have labeled it, cancel culture—has taken hold in recent years due to conversations prompted by #MeToo and other movements that demand greater accountability from public figures.” It then credits black Twitter users for the term.

This semester, I’ve taught a seminar on how race has shaped the legal system. It’s been an eye-opening experience. As we studied the aftermath of the Civil War, I was struck by a phenomenon that looks a lot like cancel culture, except on steroids.

Former rebels didn’t take their defeat on the battlefield lying down. They unleashed violence and terrorism on their supposedly victorious enemies that spurred the creation of a committee on lawlessness and violence at Texas’ 1868 constitutional convention, three years after the Civil War. The committee observed that, “multitudes who participated in the rebellion, disappointed and maddened by their defeat, are now intensely embittered against the freedmen on account of their enfranchisement, and on account of their devotion to the Republican party, and against the loyal whites for their persistent adhesion to the Union…that it is their purpose even by desperate measures to create such a state of alarm and terror among Union men and freedmen as to compel them to abandon the advocacy of impartial suffrage or fly from the State…”

People often worry about cancel culture suppressing free speech. A 2018 study found that 54% of college students felt “intimidated in sharing your ideas, opinions, or beliefs in class because they were different than those of your classmates or peers.” And to be sure, there have been worrying incidents. When a Bryn Mawr student posted on the school’s ride-share Facebook page looking to see if anyone would be interested in going to a Donald Trump rally, several posters called her racist while others threatened her physically. The harassment led her to drop out of college.

But this threat to free speech is not new, as Texas’ experience shows. In 1868, the committee on lawlessness and violence noted that “There is absolute freedom of speech in very few localities in Texas.” Rather, “Union men dare not generally avow their political convictions” because “the dominant rebel element will not tolerate free discussion.” In fact, things were so bad that “hundreds of loyal men, to our knowledge, are at this time forsaking their homes in Texas, fleeing from the assassin, [and] forced away by rebel intolerance.”

Former rebels admitted to things like firing guns into a black church, murdering black officials in cold blood, and whipping black women “to compel the negroes to give up Loyal Leagues, and to get satisfaction out of them for supporting Yankees.”

Cancel culture was real in in Texas after the Civil War in a way that puts today’s debate over it in perspective. Texans with unpopular opinions (you might even say politically incorrect ones) were not at risk of being called out or being shamed. They were at risk of having their very lives cancelled. What were those politically incorrect opinions? Believing in black equality and supporting the Union. Many celebrities who get “cancelled” these days wind up just fine.

Still, Texas gives us two cautionary lessons about cancel culture, but not in the way many critics suppose. First, we should really worry about cancelling when majorities do it to vulnerable minorities. The consequence of being cancelled for those at the margins of society are likely to be real in a way they aren’t for wealthy celebrities.

Second, before cancelling people, we should ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: is the person whose opinion we find repugnant actually right? Could they be getting at a truth we’ve overlooked? The former rebels who cancelled loyal Unionists surely thought their cause was righteous. They were wrong. Today, many of us look back and ask, how could anyone have thought about cancelling people for advocating loyalty to the government and black equality? Before we cancel people today, we would do well to ask ourselves if future generations will react similarly. Are we really trying to eliminate injustice, or will future generations see that we instead enabled it?

If nothing else, Texas’ experience should make us think twice before we exaggerate cancel culture, or engage in it.

Some Nazis Had Redeeming Qualities

History, politics, Pop Culture, ,

Can a good person be a Nazi? The Nazis murdered millions of people, broke treaties, plunged the world into a terrible war, all for horrible ideas. So it seems absurd even to consider such a question. Wading into the uncomfortable space where we ask it is Man in the High Castle.

Based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel, Man in the High Castle describes a world where the Germans and Japanese won World War Two. They have both carved up the United States into zones of influence: the Japanese control the West and the Germans the East. After defeating the allies, they are now in a cold war reminiscent of the one that actually happened between the United States and the Soviet Union. The show follows Juliana Crane and her boyfriend Frank (along with others) as they are caught up in the resistance to Germany and Japan. One the men they are resisting is John Smith.

When American Heroes Become Nazis

Our first introduction to Smith is as a high-level Nazi bureaucrat ferreting out American resistance. Smith orders a man to be tortured, and then beaten to death. He’s set up nicely to be a villain for us to hate for the entire series. This is fair for a man who does many villainous things. He double-crosses a band of black smugglers by promising them money in exchange for one of the films [on the show, Hitler tasks him with finding films depicting an alternate universe where the Nazis lost world war two], but then sends a bomb. He demonstrates no remorse about participating in war crimes and genocide as a younger man.

But there’s more. He’s a loving father and husband. You can see it in the way he interacts with his son and daughters when they’re eating breakfast or in the intimate moments he shares with his wife. And it is precisely those attachments that make his journey as a Nazi so compelling. The Nazis on the show–and in real life–engaged in euthanasia for anyone they deemed subhuman. This includes those with debilitating ailments. At first he and his wife seemed to agree with this; his wife observed after seeing Smith’s brother in a wheelchair that such people weren’t permitted to suffer under Nazi rule, i.e., were euthanized. Her tune changed when she learned their son Thomas had a rare, incurable disorder. The doctor gave Smith an ultimatum: kill his son himself, or have the condition reported to the government (in which case Thomas would have been killed anyway). To save his son’s life, Smith murdered the doctor and covered it up. At the same time he was rising up the Reich’s hierarchy, he was a victim  of its ideology. And although he was an ambitious man, he was willing to put his ambitions at risk for those he loved. With an excellent portrayal by Rufus Sewell, viewers are eventually left cheering for what remains of Smith’s humanity to prevail over his darkness.

As the series went on, we learned that Smith had fought bravely in the U.S. Army before the Nazis took over. This is a tantalizing hint of what might have been for his character: a patriotic American devoted to serving his country and its ideals. More than anything, I’m left with questions for him. Did he ever think about joining the resistance? What were his views towards the blacks and Jews targeted by the Nazis? What about Nazism appealed to a decorated American soldier?

What can we learn from John Smith?

Smith’s nuanced portrayal differs from the way Nazis usually appear in popular media. On Man in the High Castle, Hitler was a crazed maniac obsessed with crushing the resistance to his rule and tracking down the films. In Wolfenstein: the New Collosus, Hitler is cartoonishly evil, vetting auditions for actors trying to play his nemesis Billy (a man fighting in the resitance to Nazi rule in the game) and shooting those who displease him. And Hitler wasn’t even the craziest on the show; that honor belongs to Reinhard Heydrich and others plotting to embroil the world in a war with Japan. It says something about the bloodlust of the Nazis on the show that Hitler is too meek for some of them.

An exception is the German movie Downfall, set during the last days of world war two. Hitler is shown at the beginning being kind to his secretary and dog and appreciative of the efforts his Hitler Youth soldiers make. Of course, there are limits to how much Downfall can humanize Hitler given the historical record. The movie recognizes this. Out of touch with reality, he orders around nonexistent German units to attack his enemies and fulminates against generals who accurately describe the military situation. His SS hunts down and hangs old men who refuse to fight against overwhelming odds.

The best Downfall can do is give Hitler’s monstrosity a human gloss. But there can be no doubt that a man who plunged the world into a war that continues to affect us today and ordered the genocide of people he deemed inferior is a monster.

The only way Hitler could have succeeded, though, was with the assitance of others. There were the millions of Germans who shared every aspect of his wretched ideology and cheered him on as he trampled on human rights and brought war. But even that was insufficient. To be as effective as he was, he needed the assistance of people like John Smith, people who had consciences and redeeming qualities. That is scary.

One enduring lesson from world war two is to vigilantly guard against leaders like Hitler. And yet to stop there lets us off too easy. To truly avoid repeating the atrocities, we have to be vigilant against men like John Smith.

Would Nazis Have Been Any Worse For Blacks Than Jim Crow?

History, politics, Pop Culture, Race

The question of what life in America would have looked like under Nazi rule continues to fascinate us. In 2019, shows like Man in the High Castle are still popular. The show’s three seasons, set in 1960s America, are plenty-thought provoking, but given that it makes only oblique references to race at a time the civil rights movement would have been blooming historically, it left me wondering what a Nazi-ruled America would have looked like for blacks.

Nazi Racial Ideology

Racism was core to Nazism. In Mein Kampf, everything good was associated with Aryans, the alleged master race. Hitler declared that “[a]ll the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” Blacks were inferior. For Hitler, in fact, they were part of a Jewish plot to degrade Germany: “[i]t was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.”

These attitudes influenced Nazi policy. The few blacks in Germany found it impossible to become German citizens; their passports eventually read “stateless negroes.” In 1941, they were kicked out of German public schools. They were the focus of forced sterilization efforts.

Historian Eve Rosenhaft suggests that a 1942 survey of blacks in Europe was done with the intent of rounding them up. That never happened. But during the war, the Nazis used blacks as propaganda to stiffen the German people’s’ spines. Take a look at these pictures:

Ironically, the Nazis later targeted black soldiers in their propaganda efforts during the war too. Leaflets targeting black soldiers bragged “there have never been lynchings of colored men in Germany. They have always been treated decently.” Others claimed that “colored people living in Germany can go to any church they like. They have never been a problem to the Germans.”

But black soldiers would have seen this for the lie it was. Black newspapers drew parallels between Jim Crow and Nazism before the U.S. even entered the war. In 1938, the New York Amsterdam News reported that “[t]aking a leaf from United States Jim Crow practices against the Negro, German Nazis plan to Jim Crow Jews on German railways…” More ominously, it noted that “[t]he Nazis, in declaring their intentions of Jim-Crowing Jews within the Reich, specifically cited American Jim Crow customs against its Negro citizens…” Walter White of the NAACP even went so far as to ask Jesse Owens and other black athletes to boycott the 1936 Olympics because it was being held in Nazi Germany.  He warned that “if the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the world are successful it is inevitable that dictatorships based upon prejudice will spread throughout the world, as indeed they are now spreading.”

Nazi obsession with racial purity ultimately led to the holocaust where more than six million Jews were murdered. Other groups such as gypsies, gays, and slavs suffered grievously too.

Life for Blacks under Nazi Occupation

Given their propensity for genocide, what would the Nazis have done if they had taken over America and its millions of blacks? Surely nothing good. Man in the High Castle hints at this. At one point, Joe Blake, one of the main characters, reads the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to a child. After reading a passage about Jim, the child asks “how can he be good–he’s black!” At which point his mom notes that the Nazis banned the book. We can infer that when they took over America, the Nazis’ propaganda targeted blacks. In the show, one of the most important resistance fighters, Lemuel Washington, is black, and so are several others. So we can infer that whatever remained of the black community perceived the Nazis as a sufficiently serious threat that it was preferable to risk death in the resistance.

The book makes these implicit racial dynamics explicit. The Nazis reinstituted slavery in the United States. This outcome is so horrifying because it is so believable. Slavery legally ended with the 13th amendment. But it continued in all but name with things like peonage, sharecropping, and chain gangs. Well into the 20th century, an outside observer could look at the lives of many blacks and conclude they had not improved since slavery. Nazi occupiers could have used blacks (and other disfavored minorities) as slave labor to power their war effort the way they used slave labor in Europe. And Nazi slavery might have been even worse than American slavery. During the antebellum period, slaves had the hope–however distant and difficult–of running the underground railroad to freedom in the North. But with Nazis occupying all of America, where would they have gone?

An even more horrifying possibility could have greeted blacks when Nazis arrived: extermination. We know the Nazis viewed blacks as inferior, and we know from the holocaust that they were willing to commit genocide against groups they despised. The logical conclusion of these attitudes would be death camps. And just as Poles and Ukrainians aided Nazis in their persecution of Jews, we can imagine some racist Americans doing similarly. This would have made blacks especially likely to resist Nazi occupation. So in the video game Wolfenstein: the New Collosus, when a black woman was a key resistance leader, I was unsurprised. All Americans would have lost freedom and dignity under Nazi rule, just as those living in conquered European nations had. Blacks could have faced wholesale genocide. The resulting calculus would have been something like “I could die if I do resist, but I will die if I don’t.” As an aside, Wolfenstein surprisingly offers a more thoughtful look at race relations in Nazi-occupied America. A scene in the game features KKK members and others welcoming Nazi rule with open arms, grateful to be rid of blacks and Jews. It acknowledges the backwards racial attitudes too many had when, in a flashback, the protagonist’s father punishes him for befriending a black girl.

Perhaps the most horrifying possibility is that things would have stayed the same under Nazi rule. Blacks would have attended separate and unequal schools, drank from separate water fountains, been denied the ability to live in particular neighborhoods, and faced widespread lynchings…just like they did under Jim Crow. The reason I say this is perhaps worst of all is because it means the Nazis–some of the most evil people in history–would have said “black people were already oppressed enough before we got here.”

This possibility was reflected in Jesse Owen’s experience. At the 1936 Olympics, Owens put the lie to Nazi racial ideology by winning four gold medals. There was a persistent story that Hitler refused to shake Owen’s hand. But Owens wryly noted, “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.” He later reflected that “after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country and I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus…I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now what’s the difference [between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow]?” At a reception in his honor at the Waldorf Astoria, he was relegated to the service lift instead of the regular one reserved for whites. The sad truth is that for Owens, there was no difference between Nazi ideology about blacks and Jim Crow ideology about blacks.

All of these possibilities are frightening. But there is a more uplifting one. It’s hard to imagine a people who rebelled against a king submitting to Nazi rule. I’m confident that there would have been widespread resistance. The only way for any resistance movement to succeed would have been to unify across racial and ethnic divides. And there is hope that even racists resisting the Nazis would have had reason to reconsider their prejudices. The more self-aware ones would have been able to draw parallels between Jim Crow and Nazi racial policies.

The trailer for season four of the Man in the High Castle looks promising when it comes to race. Lots of black resistance fighters are portrayed. And I hope the show will explore in more depth what racial dynamics look like in Nazi-occupied America.

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Friday Night Lights Was What Roseanne Could Have Been

politics, Pop Culture

 

Image result for friday night lights

Rosanne is off the air for good after her racist tweet. Some are mourning the show’s loss because it portrayed a working class, Trump-supporting family sympathetically. The thinking has been that Hollywood and national media organizations are too quick to assume Trump voters are automatically racist and sexist. For their part, Trump voters felt misunderstood and enjoyed having a show that finally showed respect for their experience. Commentators who miss it want another show to showcase a family like Roseanne’s. But Friday Night Lights long ago accomplished what Rosanne could have.

Friday Night Lights centered around a High School football team in Dillon, Texas. One of the things I enjoyed about the show was how it used football as a vehicle to explore many serious issues still affecting our country.

It dealt with racism. Smash Williams (a black player) was the team’s running back, and he faced racism throughout season one. To make matters worse, it even came from his assistant coach Mac McGill, who should’ve had his back. In one episode, McGill observed that black players are like junkyard dogs and intellectually unfit to play quarterback. Unsurprisingly, Smash and the other black players were furious. It got to the point where they seriously contemplated sitting their next game. This episode was already interesting in that, far from portraying Dillon as an idyllic place, it laid bare simmering racial tensions between blacks and whites.

Where it got even better was that it allowed McGill to be more than an old white racist. At the next game, Smash got tackled after scoring a touchdown, and the ensuing altercation led officials to cancel the game. As the team rode home, the police stopped the team and came aboard to arrest Smash, claiming evidence that he threw the first punch. Of all people, McGill stood up, and told the police he wasn’t letting them on the bus without a warrant. And then in my favorite moment from the episode, said they made mistaken assumptions about Smash, “just like I did.” Maybe, McGill was just trying to ingratiate himself with his black players. But I like to think he genuinely grew. He was able to recognize his own racism and do better. In its own way, the incident shows us how to finally eradicate racism as a country. People like Mac McGill need to have the courage to see themselves as they really are and the confidence that they can be better.

Racial issues, of course, have been a central topic of discussion during the Trump administration. Think of the controversies over NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem, the President’s remarks after Charlottesville, or the immigration executive orders. In today’s climate, with its ongoing race conversation, we don’t really have a show like Friday Night Lights that shows racism in all of its ugliness, and yet manages to preach a message of racial optimism without being preachy.

I enjoyed how the show handled gender and career issues. One of the show’s highlights was Coach Taylor and his wife Tami’s awesome marriage. Throughout the series they confronted, the familiar question of how partners can ensure that a woman’s career doesn’t take a backseat. The couple repeatedly prioritized Coach’s career at first. But then Tami became a principal and was eventually offered a job as director of admissions at a private college. As we were asking whether Coach would follow her and put her career first for a change, it became clear that Tami had some resentment about how the couple had prioritized their careers. She told him that she had been a coach’s wife for so many years and wanted her career to take priority for once. He did.

This is still a fraught topic. Women who are ambitious in their careers frequently have to worry about coming across as unlikable. Others worry that their desire for fulfilling careers will turn off potential partners. Tami Taylor gave us an example of a woman in the heartland willing to question the often unstated assumption that her career was not worthy of the same consideration as her husband’s, and just as importantly, of a man who ultimately joined her.

I raise all this to illustrate that we can have a show that portrays “Middle America” respectfully and realistically. One that shows how far we have as a country to go on critical issues, and one which makes clear the goodness of people who live in places that feel alienated from Hollywood. And, it turns out we never needed someone who writes racist tweets to give it to us. Friday Night Lights has been there all along.

West Wing Can Heal Our Divides

politics, Pop Culture

Image result for ainsley hayes sam seaborn

We live in polarized times. Not only do we disagree with people who hold different political views, many of us also question their decency and intelligence. Today I want to suggest at least a partial solution to our troubled politics. We should all watch season two of the West Wing.

For those who haven’t seen it, West Wing focuses on Democratic President Jed Bartlett’s administration. While the show is almost twenty years old, the administration confronts familiar issues such as immigration, capital punishment, guns, and Supreme Court appointments. What really stands out about the show is its ability to be idealistic about politics while still coming across as plausible. All with some of the wittiest dialogue I’ve ever heard.

Early on in season two, conservative Ainsley Hayes crushes White House speechwriter Sam Seaborn in a debate on the show Capital Beat. The White House then does something unimaginable in today’s political climate: it hires her. What’s more, President Bartlett’s core team comes to value and respect her. When she is being harassed by two junior staffers who send her a vase of dead flowers, Sam fires them on the spot.

Aaron Sorkin is a well-known liberal. So he could easily have caricatured Hayes and her ideological views. She could have been a stereotypical southern conservative offered for comedic relief, or as a contrast to show how much wiser and smarter staffers like Seaborn were. But to his credit, Sorkin didn’t do that. Instead, he sought to really understand how a character like Hayes would think like she does and allow her to ably defend her ideology. He wrote her to be just as smart, insightful, and witty as anyone else. He even wrote a scene where she called Seaborn on his cultural elitism in a debate over gun control when she observed that at his core, he didn’t like people who liked guns. In that scene, she also called him on a blind spot where she noted that he talked a good game about the bill of rights, but didn’t really want to protect the second amendment.

Hayes also grows to appreciate the Bartlett administration. When meeting some conservative friends, one asks her “did you meet anyone who wasn’t worthless [while working at the White House]?” In an eloquent monologue she says that while they could question the White House’s policies, “their intent is good, their commitment is true, they are righteous; and they are patriots.” She ends by saying emphatically, “I am their lawyer.” Hayes understood a truth I wish more of us grasped—that people can disagree with us on issues we feel passionately about, and still be good people.

For issues important to us, some of us wonder how another person could possibly disagree. Actually, asking that question is key to understanding our ideological opponents. Instead of assuming that someone has a different view because she’s stupid or mean, we would do better to ask “how could a decent and thoughtful person see this issue so differently than I do?” We might go on to ask “even if I still hold my original position at the end of the day, what does my friend of the opposite political persuasion have to teach me? What blind spots might she be showing me? What assumptions am I making that she’s pointing out?” To ask these questions requires humility and self-awareness. To answer them requires open-mindedness and wisdom.

Those are the virtues which will help heal our divides and break the hold of poisonous tribalism. Daily, we see politics at its worst. One of the reasons I miss the West Wing was because it gave us a glimpse of what politics could be at its best.

Reflections on Martin Luther King Day

History, Inspiration, politics, Race

Today, Martin Luther King is arguably the closest thing we have in this country to a national saint. What I mean is, most of us think of him as someone who produced a miracle in achieving civil rights. He’s someone that all Americans feel like they can rally around. Politicians from both parties routinely quote him. A snippet from one of his speeches is supposed to settle debates by itself.

I’m sure this adulation would surprise Dr. King. I’m reminded of that when I read his letter from the Birmingham jail. I’ll never get over what a remarkable document it is—he produced something more cogent and more knowledgeable from a jail cell than many of us could do with a computer and internet access and unlimited time. The letter quotes from the Bible, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Socrates. Anyway, at the time, clergy in Birmingham criticized Dr. King’s actions as untimely and called them extreme. That view didn’t disappear when Dr. King died in 1968. During the congressional debate over whether Dr. King should have a national holiday, Jesse Helms accused him of “action-oriented Marxism,” and claimed he harbored “radical political views.” The result (according to Helms) was that Dr. King’s “very name itself remains a source of tension, a deeply troubling symbol of divided society.”

What Dr. King did in his letter, among other things, was take on the idea that moderation was the highest good, unity the most important consideration. The ministers who had attacked him didn’t want him to rock the boat too much or cause too much division. They used the word “extreme” as an epithet to undermine his cause. No one wants to be seen as extreme, after all. But Dr. King reminds us that the same Jesus his clergy critics professed to worship gave his followers an extreme definition of love: that they were to love their enemies. He goes on to quote Lincoln’s admonition that America could not remain a nation half slave and half free, and Thomas Jefferson’s claim that all men were created equal, ideas that many saw as radical at one time.

After recounting our heartbreaking experience with slavery and the daily indignities racism inflicted on blacks, Dr. King demonstrated that the black community stood at a crossroads. For those who wanted change, there were those “who have lost faith in America” and “have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil,’” and those in King’s movement. The question Dr. King posed is “not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.” That is a question that should stay with us.

Dr. King teaches us that there is never a good time to demand justice. Frequently, calls for a more just society will strike those in power as “extreme.” Today, most of us take for granted that amusement parks shouldn’t close their doors to blacks and that blacks traveling should not be denied lodging at hotels because of their race. And yet those ideas were well outside the mainstream for much our history.  So for those working towards a more just society, I hope Dr. King’s example gives you heart. If you’re willing to persist in the face of criticism, you may find that what is radical today will be conventional wisdom tomorrow.

Arrow Could Hold the Key to Our Gun Control Debate

politics, Pop Culture

We’ve talked a lot about how to solve gun violence recently, especially after the Las Vegas shooting. But it’s been a long-simmering controversy that temporarily erupts periodically after shootings like Columbine or Newtown. That’s why I was so stunned when Arrow chose to devote an episode to the issue in season five (which I just watched).

In episode 13, a man who lost his family to a shooting surprises the city by shooting and killing some of Oliver Queen’s mayoral staff. It later emerges that he’s planning to attack a hospital. His motive? To punish Starling for not adopting more gun control measures. In what was an interesting twist, the show writers had Oliver deal with the issue as Mayor Queen instead of the Green Arrow, which I appreciated.

While the Green Arrow’s team attempts to find the shooter, they engage in a debate about the wisdom of gun control. Rene opposes gun control measures, as he feels citizens have a right to defend themselves. The show cut to a heartbreaking flashback where a criminal broke into his house and Rene used a gun to defend himself. Curtis, by contrast, believes in gun control measures, and Oliver wants a middle course as mayor.

What I appreciated was how Arrow allowed this disagreement to play out among friends who hold each other in high regard. That element seems to be what’s missing in a lot of debates over contemporary issues. It might be easy for Rene to dismiss a gun control proponent as someone who looks down on people who own guns and doesn’t care that people are worried about being able to defend themselves. But he couldn’t do that with Curtis, who obviously cares about the pain he carries from losing his wife. And Curtis could have assumed that gun control opponents were nuts bent on stockpiling guns regardless of the consequences for everyone else. But he couldn’t do that when presented with Rene’s story.

It’s easier to compromise with someone you respect and someone whom you know respects you. Without grasping this basic truth, I fear we will have trouble finding consensus on difficult issues. Perhaps a good start would be to have everyone watch Arrow.