Tradition of tolerance keeps violence at bay

By Steve Janoski

Elections are like wars: they have the capacity to bring out either the best or the worst in people — but mostly, they bring out the worst.

And when it’s a presidential election, things get even uglier as candidates of all sides illuminate the crevasses that divide our political spectrum, and often their own words drive wider the chasm that exists between the Left and the Right.

It becomes far too easy to become bitter and jaded when the other side wins, and all we can see is what irreparable damage they’ll do to our fragile country over the next four years, but it’s during those times especially that we must sit back, take a breath, and widen our view.

News from across the globe has been bleak over the last few months, and makes me thankful that in this nation, the most maniacal fringes of both parties are (generally) kept at bay; every day, in other parts of the world, it seems the Black Hundreds gather strength.

In Greece, the New York Times reported in early July, an influx of Arabic immigrants has led to the rise of the right-wing group “Golden Dawn,” which seems to be fine with using violence to deliver on its promises to “rid the land of filth.”

Just one week after the extremist party gained what the paper called an “electoral foothold” in Greece’s Parliament this summer, 50 of its members, riding motorcycles and armed with “heavy wooden poles” and shields emblazoned with swastika-like symbols, delivered an ultimatum to immigrant business owners in one Athens suburb: shut down and move out within a week, or your business burns. As the xenophobic attacks escalate, police have been reportedly looking the other way.

In the same week, that paper also reported that Russia’s upper house of Parliament passed bills that have criminalized slander, allowed the government to block websites deemed “dangerous to children,” imposed “draconian fines” on people who participate in unsanctioned protests, and required politically-driven nonprofits that receive money from outside the country to be identified as “foreign agents.”

And, in China, the Rev. Thaddeus Ma Daqin, ordained as next in line to take over as bishop of Shanghai, stunned the masses by announcing that he would not work for the government-run Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which oversees that country’s Catholics.

He wanted to focus more on pastoral work and evangelization, he said, and as a result was renouncing his membership to the association. He has not been heard from since. Chinese officials say he is “on retreat.”

It is likely that these types of stories could be pulled from any newspaper at any time of any year; indeed, there is always some government somewhere trying to keep its people bound and blindfolded. But these are not just any countries — one is the world’s most populous rising power, while the other, although faded, still has enough nuclear weapons to end life on the planet. And Greece (ironically) is the vaunted “birthplace of democracy.”

So I admit, things in America are bad, and they could become worse — no people are immune to being subtly (and then forcefully) oppressed just because they were born on this patch of land instead of that one.

But we are not there yet. In fact, we’re a long, long way away. And, for all of the breaches of democracy that things like the PATRIOT Act contain, Americans still retain a sense of what is right, what is wrong, and what is evil.

So through all of the bickering and arguing, all of the out-of-context campaign ads about Obama being a Muslim communist and Romney being an outsourcing blue-blood,  we must remember that politics in America are like fistfights between sailors at a bar — no matter how bruising it was, if the shooting starts, we’re all still on the same side.

We must remind ourselves of that when the sun dawns over America on Nov. 7…no matter how difficult or painful it may seem.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com