Positively Negative

Last week, my friend Billy sent me a picture of a sign on the wall at McLean’s Hospital in Boston, one of our country’s most well-known psychiatric facilities. It’s there to reveal the ways in which alcohol tricks us into thinking it will help us while in fact, it leads us to despair. The sign read:

We drank for joy and became miserable.

We drank for sociability and became argumentative.

We drank for sophistication and became obnoxious.

We drank for friendship and became enemies.

We drank to help us sleep and awakened exhausted.

We drank to gain strength and it make is weaker.

We drank for exhilaration and ended up depressed.

We drank for “medical reasons” and acquired health problems.

We drank to help us calm down and ended up with the shakes.

We drank to get more confidence and became afraid.

We drank to make conversations flow more easily and the words came out slurred & incoherent.

We drank to diminish our problems and saw them multiply.

We drank to feel heavenly and ended up feeling like hell.

Alcohol addiction remains a scourge in our country, but most of us now realize that millions of us are also addicted to contempt and hatred in our political life. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the challenge of coming clean—about admitting that all of us have played a role in making things worse. To borrow the framing of AA, a lot of us need to escape our addiction to labeling, othering, and division. I offer again to take the first step: “Hi, I’m Tim. And I’m a divider.”

I hope you will all answer, “Hi, Tim.”

Here’s what the sign on the wall might look like for our national addiction to hate:

We used hatred of them to bring joy to us and became miserable.

We used contempt to show our conviction and became argumentative.

We used scapegoating to show our status and became obnoxious.

We used division to show we belonged and became lonely.

We used cable news to reassure us and became angry.

We used name calling to show we’re superior and ended up feeling inferior.

We used shaming to help us cope and ended up hopeless.

We used hostility to prove our principles and became despairing of achieving them.

This is not a gimmick for a newsletter but a deadly serious offer to our culture. I’ve asked a lot of experts (psychologists, spiritual masters, and, most importantly, addicts) to help us design a model of a group that will help us escape our addiction to hatred and enter recovery. For the time being let’s call the group “Dividers Anonymous.”

I’ve drafted proposed “steps” for daily reflection and prayer that might hold the promise of putting us on a path toward a new way of life both as individuals and as a country. Like any addiction and recovery program, we know at the outset that if we’re seeking perfection we’ll fail—progress, not perfection is our goal.

Step 1: I admit that Dividing, Blaming, and Scapegoating aren’t working. I am powerless to overcome them on my own.

Step 2: I will practice seeing myself, others, and life itself as good. I trust that this goodness comes from my source or my higher power.

Step 3: I commit to respect the dignity of everyone. No exceptions.

Step 4: I hunger to be part of something bigger than me.

Step 5: I seek to heal the divides that separate me from others.

Step 6: I will work to identify with and heal suffering—my own and that of others.

Step 7: I trust that conflict, when met by the skillful means of a uniter, is part of the process of creating something new and solving seemingly intractable problems.

Step 8: I commit to being a part of and sharing a new story of justice and joy for all of us.

As you look at these steps, I hope you see the paradox of all forms of recovery: that we have to let go to connect; we have to lose to win; we have to be vulnerable to attain strength. That’s us as a country: we have to let go of our labels and parties and assumptions long enough to try to build something new, something better, something good.

Lots of people might think this is crazy—that our division is too deep. But that’s what people say about addicts all the time—they’re too far gone. But if we own our illness and commit to change, anything is possible. We can rethink our assumptions: how we succumb to party and group pressure, how we remain trapped in historic patterns and hatreds. A set of principles like these can help release us from our unconscious hatred of others who pray, look, and love differently than we do. With practice and commitment, we can travel the path to seeing the dignity of others rather than passing judgment on what we don’t understand.

I’m ready to join this group and can already imagine practices and supports for each step. Practices of silence and mediation will play a big part. We’ll have to learn to listen. We’ll have to practice skills like empathy. We’ll have strategies for building our sense of agency and self-confidence in pursuit of our differing beliefs. We’ll have to learn how to share our fears and biases with vulnerability so we can find the moral courage to overcome them with strength. We’ll have fun too—we’ll play games that encourage us to build a sense of team and inclusion. And, of course, we’ll need to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable.

The challenge is urgent. Our country is bottoming out. I’m ready to enter recovery. How about you?

In unity,

Tim