I recently saw a political cartoon that portrayed President Obama making a statement on television that he had failed to stop a meteor from rocketing towards earth and that we would all be vaporized. At the end of the bar was a white person with a “Right Winger” t-shirt cheering another failure of the Obama Administration. This was on the same day in which a report stated that a Louisiana Justice of the Peace had refused to let a mixed racial couple get married, as if skin color had anything to do with how we feel about each other. According to Malcolm Gladwell, it has a lot to do with how we feel about each other – as if we needed another book to tell us that race is a problem in the US.

Of course, it’s not just race that divides us. Gender, sexual orientation, nation of birth, parents who use their kids for publicity stunts (OK, I understand why people would put those folks in another category), which college we attended, political affiliation, favorite color, etc. Henri Tajfel found that you can get people to begin acting like a bunch of politicians (“groupthink” at its finest) and hooligans with a flip of a coin or preference for a painting. He would bring people into a room, flip a coin or have them look at a painting. He would then put people in groups based on the coin toss or which painting they liked – in other words, these experimental subjects saw how trivial the divisions were. The groups were then asked to do some kind of task and then decide on rewards for both their own group members and those of the other group. Even if the other group performed better, most people would give more rewards to their own group. Believe it or not, bankers and insurance company employees were not part of these experiments, though both industries have perfected the skill of rewarding their own after putting up disastrous results.

The question becomes how do we get beyond these trivial and childish behaviors. Malcolm Gladwell discussed an interesting technique being used by some groups and individuals – screens. Think back to that cartoon person – if he had only heard that a meteor was headed for earth, he wouldn’t have cared who said it. If the couple had told the Louisiana Justice of the Peace how much they loved each other without him laying eyes on them (and how much they would love their children, as that also seemed to be a concern for the Justice of the Peace), it’s hard to believe he would’ve said, “I don’t think y’all should get hitched.” Carrying around screens would make life difficult and inconvenient (then again, I think the same thing about cell phones from time to time), though it might be useful to start pretending like we did. We know we have become a civil society the day the newspaper carries only on headline which reads — “Yesterday, Everyone Got Along.” My job will end on that day, but it’s a sacrifice I’d be willing to make.