Roberto Martinez: Americans’ common ideals; let’s embrace them together | Opinion
Americans are a nation. We share common ideals: respect for equality, individual rights, liberty, justice, opportunity and democracy. These ideals unite us. In the words of our Pledge Allegiance, we are: “...one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Yet, with each passing day we are more divided. We have become self-destructive. We seem to be engaged in a mean-spiritedness that is consuming our nation and creating a cancer that is destroying the fabric and unity of our communities. Our foreign adversaries couldn’t have devised a more destructive weapon against us than what we seem to be doing to ourselves.
Americans desperately need to make the effort to try to understand each other. We can’t be understood if we don’t even try to understand. It needs to start with each one of us respecting each other. And it can’t wait.
We can’t look to our political leaders for leadership. Most of them are failing us. The strategy pursued by many of them seems to have as its goals to demean, destroy, divide and win — to benefit themselves. And all political parties seem afflicted by this.
The primary system caters to the lowest common denominator within each faction, resulting in the election of nominees who cater to insular passionate minorities within each party, resulting in the choice in the general election between candidates that represent the views of, at best, a small segment of Americans. This forces the voters to choose from among candidates who do not represent most Americans, further dividing us and weakening the bonds that unite our nation.
And we can’t look to some of our so-called “news” organizations, as our parents did not too long ago, to inform us with a broad range of information to enlighten us and shine the path forward to allow each of us to better understand our world. Their business models are designed to do just the opposite. They are full of sensational headlines and “breaking news” designed as clickbait and intended to manipulate us and incite anger.
The goal for some of them is to maximize revenues fueled by confirmation bias deployed as anger news to appeal to a discreet box canyon of insular opinions, creating an information loop that demonizes anyone with different views. And the use of artificial intelligence algorithms by these “news” organizations has the potential to further magnify biases by pushing viewpoints through word choice and oversimplifying complex issues with the use of simplistic data points.
Presenting the news to better understand our world and our neighbors seems, at best, quaint. It is not what drives anger journalism.
We don’t have to agree with each other. What we need to do is to speak with each other, and not over each other while stepping on each other’s words. If we start doing that, just taking that one step, we will be better understood.
And it will begin to restore our appreciation that although we are a nation with people of diverse backgrounds, experiences and opinions, we are also a community united by common ideals — the same ideals that were the foundation for the American nation: respect for equality, individual rights, liberty, justice, opportunity and democracy.
We need to discard the mean-spiritedness destroying our nation. We Americans share a great deal of common ground.
Roberto Martínez is a lawyer in Coral Gables with the law firm of Colson Hicks Eidson. He has served as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Chair of Miami-Dade College, Vice-Chair of the State Board of Education, Chair of the Florida Federal Judicial Nominating Commission and a member of the Florida Constitution Revision Commission.