Bridges for Islands

America is a world of islands metaphorically speaking. We each stand on our own islands shouting our convictions with boldness and blindness. Our goal is to be heard and that our tenacity and declaration will provide the change we desire. As if by words alone, the world would shift and be kind and embrace all.

Add to the social and inequality unrest a pandemic that seeks to divide and isolate further by keeping us in our own little world. The result has been socially distancing not only from those we dearly love but from those whom amends need to be made or from enemies that need to sit across from each other and listen and learn.

If an enemy was attempting to destroy a nation, they could not create a more strategic plan than what is happening. Create a plot to cause dissension, division, isolation, and inevitably death from within the nation, without one shot being fired from without. We are at war with ourselves, and the enemy gleefully celebrates our destruction.

What if instead of hunkering down on our own island, expecting and demanding that everyone adhere to us and our ideals, we actually begin building bridges? Could it be that simple, and yet that profound?

One brick or board at a time we build a bridge of healing. We do something to span the gulf of the great divide between us. We act on the premise that seeking to understand is powerful and leads to healthy, diverse communities. Finding commonalities unite us because we are much more similar than we’d like to admit. We all have fears, insecurities, and doubts. We all have people we love and care deeply for. We all have talents, joys, celebrations, and heartaches, pain, and failures.

If we remain entrenched in our political, ideological bunkers, we accomplish nothing other than making our presence known and awaiting an opportunity to attack the other side. The posture of hunkering down within our embattlements allows hate, bitterness, and bigotry to seep into our very pores.

However, if we begin to build bridges… they provide a path to unity, to understanding, to serving one another. As Brene Brown states in “Braving the Wilderness”, “People are hard to hate close up. Move in.” If you study wars throughout the ages, you will notice that enemies blow up bridges --- they eliminate the very tool that could bring people together and resources to a specific community. The absence of bridges leads to isolation, loss of hope for rescue, sense of a doomed destiny. But the presence of bridges creates the avenue to carry healing, hope, and community!

Once a bridge is built it can be traversed often --- monthly, daily, or hourly if you so desire. The path to bring a people together is established – the hard work is finished. The reaping of the benefits of this link to one another can now be a reality.

We are each presented with a critical decision. Will we remain on our own individual islands, entrenched in the “rightness” of our thinking and convictions, refusing to sit at the table of those who dare to believe differently? Or will we begin to build bridges to hope, understanding, and community and span the divide often? What will you choose?

Let me leave you with words from one of my favorite classics, “To Kill a Mockingbird” --- “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”