We Need More Pollyannas, not Fewer

So it appears Pollyanna was right all along.

When she saw Mrs. Snow picking out the lining and other accoutrements for her coffin, she was aghast.

When her aunt’s servants were sour-faced at the thought of another Sunday, she was appalled.

And when old Mr. Pendergast didn’t want to show another snotty orphan his prisms, she pushed past his bluster and resentment.

We need more Pollyannas.

And I’m going to relate it to November’s election.

I can hear it already, said in the clipped words of one of Aunt Polly’s dour servants:  “Here it comes. Miss Goody-Two-Shoes is going to find something about Sunday to be glad about.”

I get that there’s a lot of resentment out there that Donald Trump won the election (winning via the Electoral College, if not by popular vote).

I get that resentment fueled Trump’s rise through the Republican primaries to the Presidency.

But if we leave that resentment unaddressed, unacknowledged, we’re going to see more Fergusons. More Occupy Wall Streets. More Black Lives Matter. More The South Shall Rise Again. More from the Alt Right. More Malheur National Wildlife Refuges. More Standing Rocks. More of this and more of that until there’s so much of it Pollyanna herself will stop playing The Glad Game.

Maybe we’re all looking into that church barrel for a doll and seeing only a pair of crutches.

Maybe we ought to remember that, right now, we ought to be glad that we don’t need them.

If we can’t get rid of resentment, it’s going to be our downfall.

And what do I mean? I’ll let Katherine J. Cramer, author of “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” as she told the Washington Post:

One of the very sad aspects of resentment is that it breeds more of itself. Now you have liberals saying, “There is no justification for these points of view, and why would I ever show respect for these points of view by spending time and listening to them?”
 

Thank God I was as naive as I was when I started. If I knew then what I know now about the level of resentment people have toward urban, professional elite women, would I walk into a gas station at 5:30 in the morning and say, “Hi! I’m Kathy from the University of Madison”?

I’d be scared to death after this presidential campaign! But thankfully I wasn’t aware of these views. So what happened to me is that, within three minutes, people knew I was a professor at UW-Madison, and they gave me an earful about the many ways in which that riled them up — and then we kept talking.

And then I would go back for a second visit, a third visit, a fourth, fifth and sixth. And we liked each other. Even at the end of my first visit, they would say, “You know, you’re the first professor from Madison I’ve ever met, and you’re actually kind of normal.” And we’d laugh. We got to know each other as human beings.

That’s partly about listening, and that’s partly about spending time with people from a different walk of life, from a different perspective. There’s nothing like it. You can’t achieve it through online communication. You can’t achieve it through having good intentions. It’s the act of being with other people that establishes the sense we actually are all in this together.

As Pollyannaish as that sounds, I really do believe it.

What Cramer advocates is talking.

Talking without the filters of the national media, without politics, without technology. Just old-fashioned talking. And listening. And acknowledging differences. And finding common ground. But without polls and focus groups and talk of city-slickers and flyover country.

I’ll have Cramer say it again:

That’s partly about listening, and that’s partly about spending time with people from a different walk of life, from a different perspective. There’s nothing like it. You can’t achieve it through online communication. You can’t achieve it through having good intentions. It’s the act of being with other people that establishes the sense we actually are all in this together.

As Pollyannaish as that sounds, I really do believe it.

If we don’t listen to each other, really try to understand each other, we may as well live on Camazotz. No resentment there when everybody is just like everybody else – and can be euthanized for bouncing a ball out of rhythm. Conor Friedersdorf echoes as much writing at The Atlantic:

The coalition that opposes Donald Trump needs to get better at persuading fellow citizens and winning converts, rather than leaning so heavily on stigmatizing those who disagree with them. Chief among the problems with stigma as a political weapon?

It doesn’t work.

Meet someone with a thought that doesn’t match your own? He or she doesn’t bounce the ball right, is what you’re saying.

Don’t be IT. Be Pollyanna. Be Meg. Be the best Meg you can be. But you have to be the Pollyanna or the Meg with the kid who can’t bounce the ball right, or it’s all for naught.

Remember, we want nothing from you that you do without grace, “the love and mercy given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not because of anything we have done to earn it.”