Rex Smith: Lifting our heads to see more respect

The first time I went snorkeling, I was terrified by the sight of a barracuda swimming near me. It's a really scary-looking fish, though in fact barracuda almost never attack swimmers. But I didn't know that then.

Irrationally, I stuck my head above water to avoid the terror — what you can't see can't hurt you, right? — and, surprisingly, my fear abated. It was sunny and calm up there, like a different and less terrifying world.

That's the nearest comparison I can make to the sensation that gripped me the other morning as I was driving to work. As I switched radio stations back and forth between people talking about current events on the AM and FM bands, I felt as though I was traveling in a flash from one society to another. Maybe it wasn't two worlds, but surely the talkers in one studio couldn't be the same nationality as those in the other, nor could they be describing the same nation. They were completely at odds.

And they weren't just passionate in their competing worldviews, but also outraged at people on the other side. Those on the right struck me as bitter and irrational, those on the left as haughty and harsh.

Lifting my head out of the water in this case was easy: I switched to a music station, and the sun shone brighter, I'm sure. What you can't hear can't bother you, right?

But in fact that's not right. Not listening won't help a divided nation. We need to pay attention to each other, because our disunity is now threatening our stability. The now-divided states of America have prompted some scholars to compare our current division to the emotional split that preceded the Civil War.

We know the disaster that resulted from the failure of two sharply contentious camps of Americans to bridge their gap without violence a little more than a century and a half ago: Perhaps 750,000 Americans died, more than the number of military deaths in all other U.S. wars combined. Half the nation's infrastructure collapsed. Unresolved disputes fueled bitterness that lingers today.

On the other hand, of course, the war freed four million people who had been enslaved because of their skin color. It also established the authority of the national government, which has held the nation together with the abiding respect of the majority of its citizens ever since.

Until now, anyway. Do we still respect the government we create with our votes and our civic involvement? Indeed, do we Americans respect each other?

Many people blame Donald Trump for America's divisions; even his great supporters would have to agree that he doesn't try to soothe the nation into harmony at moments of distress, as his predecessors did. To this point in his presidency, at least, he's more into busting things than patching them up. That's how he has always operated.

But blaming Trump is too easy. In the summer before he was elected, 80 percent of Americans said the country was greatly divided, according to an AP-NORC poll. Sure, he hasn't done anything to improve the situation, but Trump's presidency is more a result of our division than a cause.

This division is a factor in the long-range pessimism that grips us. More than half of Americans in 2016 believed that the country's best days were in the past. That finding, by the way, showed a sharp racial divide: Black and Hispanic Americans felt better about the future, while most whites said the good times were left behind.

America has always been a diverse nation, but it is becoming ever more so, a shift that is key to our discord. At the same time, we have experienced almost four decades of growing economic inequality — the poor growing relatively poorer, the middle class stagnant, and the upper fraction of Americans richer.

To begin to solve this, the economist Richard V. Reeves recently suggested, we might most need a return of respect for each other — because social equality can be defined as "your right to look me in the eye as an equal." We are divided by economic status, geography and education, Reeves writes, but underlying all those is a respect gap, which yields perceived inequality.

These days, he notes, the upper middle class looks down on the working class, who return the favor by disparaging experts and leaders, with a "rising inverse snobbery of many of those in the angry middle class." The growing contempt for education and science, with the potential to leave America behind the rest of the world, is one result.

A lot of policy changes, most requiring political capacity just now in short supply, will be needed to bring Americans together. But maybe a culture change must precede that: a renewal of mutual respect. Do you imagine we can lift our heads and see our way clear to find that world?