The old me would have been astounded: an antiwar, pro-tenants’ rights, pro-civil rights activist cheering a speech by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

I am proud of my background: I marched and agitated and organized the low-income community in which I worked to protest for their rights. 

Those were the days of good guys and bad guys, and obviously I was on the side of the good guys.  The bad guys were the bureaucrats, the military-industrial complex (per President Eisenhower), police, segregationists, and anyone who was pro-“law and order,” which in my world at the time meant anti-community, anti-freedom, and anti-civil rights. 

Fast forward a few decades to a deeply moving speech made by the retiring Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and another by Attorney General Merrick Garland, about the current threats to democracy. Both speeches, made last week, called for all of us to place the “idea” of America as the higher ideal and to figure out how to get along with one another despite our differences.

The thesis they are advancing at the national level is also occurring at the organizational level: How do we work through our differences and move forward together to fulfill our values and achieve our goals?

As an activist of the 1970s, my goal was to get the federal government to live up to its promise: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [sic] are created equal….” The promise of the federal government was never questioned by me, even if that promise was written by slaveholders. 

Still, generation after generation, we have been on a slow march toward freedom and liberty in a democratic government.

Never did it occur to me that the battle would turn out to be against bad guys who sought to replace democracy with autocracy as the country’s ideal.

At his retirement speech, General Milley had this to say about the times we are now living in:

“We the American people, we the American military, must never turn our back on those that came before us. And we will never turn our back on the Constitution. That is our North Star, that is who we are, and that is why we fight.”¹

My last two years of high school were at a Quaker preparatory school in Poughkeepsie, New York.  They were the first time I was exposed to pacifism. I couldn’t define myself as a pacifist, because I was pretty sure there were causes and people I was willing to die for and maybe even kill for in self-defense. 

Reading General Milley’s words, though, reminded me of the pacifism v. war debates I had engaged in long ago. Today, at this time in my life cycle, I am grateful that there is a General Milley who was willing to hold the line against authoritarianism, even with his military orientation. This would have been a shock to the old me those decades ago.

I have read enough about his travails over the last four years to know that he is among those who literally held the line to protect our democracy, however imperfect it still might be.

Merrick Garland made a similar speech in an interview Sunday on CBS 60 Minutes, choking up at one point when he talked about the threat of violence against prosecutors and witnesses against Trump.²

As I watched him choke up on the television screen when talking about threats of violence, I thought how poorly we train people in this country to talk about issues where there is disagreement. 

Keep it pleasant and safe, we say. Let’s not say anything at a social gathering that will stir up dissent and disagreement. Let’s focus on our commonalities and ignore our differences. “Out of many, one” comes to mean uniformity rather than plurality, the illusion of togetherness rather than the truth of accepting one another despite our differences.

Never would I have expected myself to be relying on a military general and an attorney general to point the way for us to learn how to handle our differences. The idea that is America is betting that we can figure out a process for negotiating our way through our differences. It is betting that we can “treat each other with civility and kindness, listen to opposing views, argue as vociferously as they want, but refrain from violence and threats of violence.”

This is not a matter of coming together as individuals, ignoring our tribal identities. The challenge is far more formidable. Recall, this is the United “States”: our country was built on the presumption that separate states would somehow come to an agreement for governing the whole. The idea of governance by states vs solely by individuals is imbedded in our government structure.

Yet I continue to hear a call for promoting the individual at the sacrifice of the community or the group. The anti-woke-ism movement is about treating people as individuals and forsaking identification with a group. That approach is ahistorical, mainly because the American experiment is still in progress. As a nation, we are still trying to figure out how to get along as individuals or as groups sharing a common identity.

What does this mean for you and me? 

General Milley made the case that we must find the will and the means to come together in pursuit of a common ideal.

Think about how you get along with people with whom you fervently disagree. Are you willing to learn how to discuss these differences in a way that preserves your relationship, yet doesn’t gloss over your differences? 

If so, you are helping to enhance the American experiment. If we want democracy to thrive, it’s partly on us to show that it’s still possible. This is our choice. Let’s choose wisely.

1 Richardson, Heather Cox (Oct 2, 2023). Letters from an American.

2 Pelley, Scott (Oct 1, 2023). Attorney General Merrick Garland on the independence of Trump and Hunter Biden investigations. CBS News.