Djelloul Marbrook

The word capitalism, which is fraying at its edges as we speak, has come in handy to differentiate the American marketplace from communism, but what we really bring to market is our good will, which keeps us from each other’s throats and defines our commonweal.

It is this most marketable asset in Americans that is now under attack from the robocalls and coded messages of divisiveness from the right wing of the exhausted Republican party. Without this one asset, our intention to be tolerant of our neighbors and concerned for their well being and their rights, nothing else matters. The entire nation becomes a non sequitur without good will.

Why then would an American party of any stripe attack this more-precious-than-gold asset?

Civil disagreement and dissent butters our democratic bread, but without the civility our bread becomes gangrenous. We must respect the dignity and rights of those with whom we disagree or hand over our nation to plutocrats who will impose a deathly sameness upon us.

For this reason our elections have become increasingly scurrilous and dangerous. We are courting political catastrophe by poisoning discourse with intolerance, with the insistence that only one view is right and that for some to be right many must be wrong. Robocalls inciting to ethnic and religious intolerance disgrace the flag in which their users wrap them.

Nor are certain Republicans of the Atwater-Rove persuasion the only culprits; the Clintons squalidly played the race card.

In every community Americans of decency and good work hard every day to make their neighbors welcome. Why should they vote for candidates who do less? Everything we hold dear depends on our willingness to be at peace with our neighbors, in our willingness to live and let live, our willingness to respect boundaries, to keep up our end of the social compact.

And yet this very virtue is what right-wingers have been attacking, trying to turn us against each other, against ourselves as Americans, simply because we hold views that are different or do not look like our neighbor’s cousins.

Whatever we do about the markets, however we protect ourselves from murderers, we must not allow haters to steal our most valuable asset, our blessed neighborliness, our most renewable resource.—DM