If you really want a prolonged war the first thing to do is to reduce people into categories. Create a box that looks like an egg crate and line those people up in neat abstract rows. Crimes of passion in the first person, with a few exceptions, are shockingly traumatic for both perpetrator and victim. Crimes in the abstract are so much easier; sort of like ripping a page out of a comic book. Our language and habits over the centuries have refined and accommodated the tendency and apparent need for people to be stripped of their humanity, boxed and commodified to ease into the violence of abstractions. 

Take the word immigrant for instance. What does any of us know about the stream of people fleeing untenable circumstances looking for protection, relief, or opportunity? The quick abstract answer may be ‘not much’. We could say they are mostly good people or bad people if we wanted to sound informed, sensitive, or at least smart. But the truth is, we know more than we care to admit or even dare to feel. We share with almost all of them the love of our children, the joy of communal celebration, the appreciation of a sunset or sunrise. We share the edifying feeling of a well expressed thought being heard, a lovely song, a well accomplished building project, a graduating child, a wedding anniversary or a beloved mentor. We know somewhere in our hearts these shared treasures to be the commonweal we share with almost all those ‘immigrants’. We also share with them the deadening pain of a child’s death, a young persons pain when deprived loving parents, friends or home, the disaster of a whole life swept away by the wind, water, or a bomb. Yes, we know these people at the level of common humanity, but we are constantly being offered boxes of abstraction to insulate them from us and us from them. And sometimes when we are ready to protect ourselves from the burdens and obligations of both humanity and religious teachings, we set those boxes on fire and it is war.

So in these days of election, don’t overvalue the structures you have built around yourself to orient. Your political party, your nationality, your sports team, your region, your profession, your ethnicity or your personal story are all tools of orientation; necessary and helpful but not central. If you look at your core religious teachings, or if not that, your central sense of good you will discover that these labels and stories are only your temporary map laying over your shared humanity with every other living being. We face painful decisions to right this world. Rather than avoiding the pain through abstractions of category, nationality or even history, lets face the pain together and so it can become a celebration of recovery.