As we approach Valentine’s Day, there are several types of affection worthy of emulation. There are those of a personal nature that we share with loved ones. There are also public bonds of affection which we can nurture with those we may not agree with politically. I believe this later type of admiration is the only path forward to heal a divided country.
Let me share a personal experience and then elaborate on what public bonds of affection might look like.
My political initiation happened at the age of 15. On the cusp of receiving my driver’s license, my father came up with the idea of taking my brother and me on a trip to, among other things, meet his aunt and uncle in Michigan.
I was less than thrilled to be dragged away from my friends for two weeks, but assented — I really had no choice.
We arrived in Detroit and then drove a rental car to my great uncle’s house, where he and his wife prepared a pot roast with vegetables that the five of us shared in their small kitchen.
We then went downstairs, and my great uncle George motioned to us to sit down in front of a couch flanked by a series of pictures cascading vertically of himself standing side-by-side with each of the former presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I was impressed with those images, and over time came to espouse many of the values that he championed as governor of Michigan and as a one-time aspirant for the Republican nomination for president.
At the time, however, I must confess that I was most impressed that McDonald’s had given him a card to request complimentary food anywhere in the state (he flashed it from his wallet, suspecting it might mesmerize a teenager).
Since that time, though, I’ve developed respect for individuals with whom I may not see eye to eye politically. As I’ve learned about their lives and their values, I’ve been able to see the goodness in others that transcends enmity encouraged by cable news sound bites and online political influencers hoping to stoke partisan division.
One of these encounters with the “other side of the aisle” happened in the mid 2010s.
I was in Washington, D.C., on a business trip and decided to drop into a local church congregation in Chevy Chase, Maryland, close to where I was staying.
After the main service, a Sunday school of sorts was held upstairs. We were shoehorned into a room not much bigger than a spacious attic. I remember the sun streaming through the windows as our instructor rose from a folding metal chair to give his lesson.
That man was the chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus. On this occasion, though, politics were out of sight and out of my mind.
Sen. Harry Reid shared the circumstances of his courageous mother raising him in hardscrabble circumstances; he shared his faith, and he humbly acknowledged the shared ideals that brought us together on Sunday morning.
This was no moment to bring up his important position with him, nor his sometimes controversial public statements. He would later hurl allegations that the 2012 Republican nominee for the U.S. presidency — my great uncle’s son — had not paid his taxes.
I left on that day with the bonds of public affection strengthened for someone with whom I did not completely agree, but with whom I shared enough commonalities that I could respect his public service and whom I would not descend to demonize.
I’d have to say that there are others I am coming to respect as well. In the wake of the Congressional nearly interminable brouhaha over the speaker of the House votes, I took the opportunity to watch videos of past transfers of the gavel between incoming and outgoing speakers of the House.
While I would likely not vote for her were I a member of her Congressional district in San Francisco, I was touched by the idea that Nancy Pelosi, a woman who had raised five children before entering politics, invited the children of congressmen and congresswomen to surround her at her assumption of the speakership in 2007. Four years later when ceding the gavel to Congressman John Boehner, she reflected on the measures taken under her speakership for the collective welfare of young Americans.
Public bonds of affection will help us respect each other and may pave the way for constructive policies in a deeply divided country.
Evan Ward is associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, where he teaches courses on world history.