My fate as a future “liberal coastal elite” was sealed at age 15, when I sat down at my family’s dinner table and proudly declared that I was going to work for Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign. My normal, Catholic, conservative parents reacted the way they always did when I said something wackily reminiscent of the 60s philosophies they’d grown up with but never espoused: my dad rolled his eyes, and my stepmom ignored me.

Not surprisingly, I left my hometown for college as fast as I could and pretty much never went back. I lived in big cities, fronted a band, worked for Ralph Nader, stopped eating meat. You know the type. And I’m the only one in my family who chose this kind of track. Home isn’t home to me anymore, and hasn’t been for a while. Over the years, my ideas changed to the point where it has become difficult for me to understand many members of my family at all, and I’m sure they think I’m an alien, too.

Where I see fascinating diversity, they see frightening differences. Small-town family-oriented life bores me to even think about, let alone live, but provides them nourishment and security. And, most divisively, where they see “fair and balanced” news coverage, I see a pile of bullshit so large and offensive it can probably be seen and smelled from space.

Clearly, these members of my family and I see the world through markedly different lenses. At this point, when we do talk (which isn’t often), it’s mostly about movies and TV shows, and even in that shallow arena, our opinions still differ. We don’t have much common ground left, even though we grew up together, running the same streets, sledding the same backyard tracks. Somewhere along the line, our ideas about the world we grew up in diverged, and we stayed up late on Thanksgivings and summer vacations fighting bitterly about religion and poverty and justice. Then as adults, we shied away from conversation for so long that we barely know each other anymore.

Now, here we are on opposite sides of a thick glass wall, regarding each other with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion. We, my family and I and most of America, in fact, are victims of the culture war, shell-shocked and deaf from listening to each other’s screaming.

What is the culture war and what does it have to do with the environment?

The American culture war is a 50-year-long death match still being fought between the opposite ends of the political spectrum. In one corner we have the people who believe that history books and TV news shows are basically telling the truth, and in the other are those who believe that rich white men have run the world for too long. Each side regards the other as the worst possible type of person, hell-bent on destroying America and lacking any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Both sides are guilty of fouling the personal and political environment in our country.

Ironically, the polarization between left and right brings out the worst stereotypical behavior in both groups. Liberal city-dwellers make condescending jokes about people who actually believe the Bible, while conservative suburbanites mock environmentalists for being wussies who won’t eat meat. None of it is pretty. More importantly, all of it is destructive.

I realize I’m speaking in huge generalizations here, and that most people lie somewhere between the extremes of traditional conservative and postmodern liberal. Which makes it even more galling that our country’s political conversations are set at such a shrill, divisive level. Especially when we have so many urgent problems to solve.

The sniping between left and right prevents us from having new and meaningful conversations about how to create a cleaner and more vibrant future. Fighting about age-old arguments is just another way to spin our wheels in the familiar. And as long as we stay stuck in this pattern, any sort of real change is impossible.

Listening instead of fighting

The question at this point is, how can reasonable people get beyond this rhetorical bloodletting? How can we quit fighting this unwinnable war?

For me, the first step is to come straight out and admit that, for all my self-righteousness, I am as confused as anyone. I work for a big corporation and also for a food co-op. I disdain Wal-Mart for its heartless, big-box tactics, but I still, inexplicably, love Target. The advances of Western society have made my privileged existence possible, and yet that very privileged heart also holds deep cynicism toward those achievements and the motives behind them.

From my vantage point inside postmodern liberalism, I am fully willing to admit that it is a mixed bag. For all the good things in it, like feminism, the Civil Rights movement, and rock’n'roll, it also holds a lot of messed up families, broken-down communities, and an insidious moral relativism that has disintegrated our sense of purpose on Earth.

Similarly, I know that many people with traditional morals are also held back by the limitations of what the culture war says conservatism is. Does believing in family and tradition mean it’s necessary to buy the whole Fox News, environmentalists-are-terrorists, homosexuals-want-to-make-us-all-gay package?

On both sides of the equation, it’s a conundrum to be sure. Both points of view have valid points and both are also full of crap. Neither side has a monopoly on The Truth. So why do we feel the need to pledge allegiance to one and fight the other to the death? A better option is to use the brains God (or whoever) gave us to cherry-pick the best parts of each, carry those into the future, and leave both the bitterness and the bad ideas behind.

For example, traditional values include a lot of useful things, like how to raise strong kids who know right from wrong, the value of community, and the power of pulling together toward a common goal.

And postmodernism includes some fine stuff, too: honoring the richness of diversity, respecting individuals’ personal perspectives, and expanding one’s circle of care to include the entire world.

These all seem like good, practical values, don’t they? Put them all together and it sounds to me like a viable recipe for tackling problems and designing solutions that serve the needs of lots of different kinds of people.

And this is exactly my hope, my call to action. I am laying down my arms in the culture war, and I want you to do the same. If we are successful, maybe we can harvest the wealth of all our different worldviews and come up with a new one that ties them all together. Maybe not. But we will never know unless we stop the sniping and give ourselves a chance to connect on a higher, more human level.

So, I hereby promise to stop the snark and start really listening to people who have different ideas, especially if I don’t agree with them. In this way, I hope in my own small way to rebuild the bridges that liberals and conservatives have stupidly blown up in this useless, protracted struggle, so we can work together and fix the mess we’ve made.

Will you join me in this effort?

Over the coming months, I will report back from the front lines of sitting out the culture war. Please write and let us know how your make-like-Switzerland action is going, too.