Two Separate Worlds
How long can one country live in two separate worlds?
On September 14, 2015, Texas student Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing what was thought to be a bomb into his high school. Police determined that it wasn't a bomb and he was eventually released. These events got picked up in the news and there was an outcry about Islamophobia that hit a nerve with the country, and it became a national story. There was a groundswell of support for Mohamed and he was even invited to the White House to meet President Obama. At least, that's part of the story; whether there's an entire conspiracy hiding beneath it all depends on who you ask. The left and right have established very different versions of these events, and I'm worried that we're living in separate worlds.
My friends on the right tell me that Mohamed actually did build a bomb, but the White House is so obsequious to Muslims that they invited him to the White House to show their support anyway. There are even theories about an Islamist agenda behind it all. (There are many variations of these conspiracy theories, some of which were documented by The Dallas Morning News.)
I don't think anything of that is true, and I'm generally not concerned that an Islamist agenda is coming to take over America. But something does concern me: The right and left appear to be living in increasingly disparate worlds and we're not doing anything about it.
This isn’t going to just go away with time. Today, over a year later, my friend still believes that the President of the United States invited a bombmaker into the White House, possibly as part of some Islamist agenda. For my friends on the left, this is all nonsense that is part of yet another case of Islamophobia in the US. Then… we all went back to our lives, having a completely different version of what just happened. There was no getting together to agree on what happened, to make sure that everyone was informed of the facts, or other methods to reconcile our differences. People are just going about their lives in completely different worlds.
How can we go on like this? This seems dangerous. These worlds collide. They must. We're all citizens of the same country and we're going to have to make decisions together. Those decisions will be based on reality - a reality we all live in. Even if we disagree on some things, we have to agree on the fundamentals. We have procedures for disagreement, and maybe even procedures for disagreeing about our procedures. But at some point, we have to agree on something. We may not agree on who to vote for, but we'll have to agree on who won the election, who is a legitimate authority, and what laws legitimately govern us.
This is so concerning. I think this is disastrous for a country. I don't see how this fixes itself. It just seems like it's going to get worse and worse.