The story of Shannon Stone, the 39-year-old fireman who died after falling out of the stands at a Texas Rangers baseball game last week, weighs heavy on the mind. Every single aspect of the story could break your heart. It involved a man whose day job was saving other people’s lives, a father who had taken his 4-year-old son to see a baseball game, our national pastime. The video of the tragedy revealed its innocent cause: Stone’s simple desire to give his child the best souvenir you can’t buy, a game ball.
Every American who has heard about the story has reacted in the same way: unmitigated grief. Throats swelled when we heard the father’s first words after his fall were, “Please check on my son. My son was up there by himself.” If Americans recoiled from the images and stories of a mother gone partying after her daughter’s disappearance, they embraced and could relate to the decency and love in Stone’s reaction. They tried to imagine the family’s grief, contemplated their own mortality and hugged their loved ones a little tighter. That universal response reminds us how much Americans have in common with each other when it comes down to the values, instincts and ideals that matter most.
This reminder is always helpful, but especially at a time when our elected leaders portray a nation hopelessly divided. To turn from Mr. Stone’s story on ESPN to the nightly food fights on C-SPAN, Fox News and MSNBC was particularly jarring. Not to be a sap, but one sometimes has to be reminded: What the heck is everyone fighting about? Why do such routine disputes about economic and social policy make people so willing to question the decency of their fellow citizens with whom they have so much in common?
Republicans do not want the elderly to die destitute and hungry. Does this even need saying? Republicans love their parents and grandparents, too. So why do Democrats make such hysterical accusations about GOP proposals to trim Medicare funding? Isn’t it more likely that Republicans, rightly or wrongly, are attempting to reduce the debt as they see appropriate and are not, as some have charged, on a quest to make the old die sooner?
This ridiculous challenging of motives works both ways. For example, what about believing that individual tax rates for the highest earners should be raised to the level they were just 11 years ago magically turns traditional Democrats into unyielding socialists? No one really wants higher taxes. And certainly no one wants to pay more for the same or fewer services. Isn’t it more likely that many Democrats believe that tax increases are preferable to entitlement cuts to close the deficit? Might you think them wrongheaded? Sure. But determined to turn the middle class into serfs? Come on.
The motive-challenging goes on and on. Republicans challenging the EPA are not trying to find a better balance between regulations and public health; they are, we are told, putting the interests of their corporate contributors above the health of children. Democrats who believe that there are more cost-effective ways than lengthy prison sentences to reduce crime are, some Republicans assure us, more concerned about criminals than about the safety of our communities.
These ridiculous charges dominate our national political debate but add nothing to it. They only make compromise more difficult.
None of these criticisms should be taken to deny the importance of real debate. My most liberal friends and my most conservative friends really do disagree with one another on nearly every major policy issue. Yet when they argue, they don’t employ absurd caricatures or question each other’s motives.
Of course, it’s relatively easy for friends to argue respectfully because they have already established enough in common with each other to overcome any political disagreements. But the reaction of Americans of all ages, races, religions and geographic regions to the tragedy at Rangers Ballpark makes me think enough Americans have enough in common — similar enough values, similar enough priorities — that our elected leaders should be able to engage in necessary policy disputes without routinely attributing the worst possible motives to one another.
Kevin Ring is a freelance writer in Kensington, Maryland. He previously served on Capitol Hill as a counsel to then-Senator John Ashcroft; executive director of the Republican Study Committee; and legislative director to former Congressman John Doolittle.