How to resist the powerful forces trying to make us fear our fellow Americans

Living from fear and living from love are very different things.

Fear closes our hearts. Love opens them. Fear despairs. Love hopes. Fear shouts. Love listens. Fear has to be right. Love is willing to be wrong. Fear thinks the other side must lose for our side to win. Love knows we win together.

Our country is being fractured by fear. We fear rapid and massive change we cannot control. We fear economic instability. We fear leaders, laws and systems that deny our full humanity. We fear a culture that demeans us and the values we hold dear. We fear the damage we are doing to the natural world. Increasingly, we fear each other.

This week, during the National Week of Conversation, we can begin the necessary and courageous work of pushing back against fear. A series of more than 100 events will bring together Americans for creative conversations and to begin building bridges of understanding and cooperation.

Efforts such as the National Week of Conversation are essential because powerful interests amplify and exploit our fear for their own profit and power. News sources, search engines and social media selectively feed us information that hardens our opinions and makes them more extreme, confident that if they stoke our fear, we will come back for more.

Politicians and other factional leaders inflame our tribal fears and prejudice, knowing they can use these powerful emotions to short-circuit our reason and gain our uncritical support.

With each mean-spirited election cycle, each bitter confirmation battle, each failure to find common ground on a major issue, more and more of us are gripped by another fear – the fear that our democracy is failing.

Love helps overcome fear

There is the only one impulse of the human heart powerful enough to overcome the fear that is destroying us. That impulse is love.

Love is a strong word. For many it will sound fundamentally out of place in a discussion of politics and democracy. Civic virtue, perhaps, but surely not love.

But that is the point! How did we ever convince ourselves that we can love America without loving Americans?

As if we could love America in the abstract while despising large groups of our fellow citizens. It simply can’t be done. We cannot love America without affirming the dignity and worth of every American, and without making a wholehearted commitment to each other to work for the flourishing of all.

These commitments – to love, to the sacred dignity of every person and to the flourishing of all – change everything. “Us versus them” becomes “we are all in this together.”

Every child becomes our child. We are compelled by love to fight every threat to their flourishing – whether from poverty, racism, breakdown of families and communities, environmental degradation, or cultural values that debase their sense of who they are and who they can be.

We rightly treasure freedom, but we can become the people and the nation we are meant to be only if we embrace our freedom as the freedom to love – as the freedom to build up and not to tear down.

America is, and forever will be, a work in progress. For nearly 250 years, we have been an ever growing, ever more diverse nation with a broadening and deepening commitment to building a pluralistic society grounded in freedom, justice and opportunity for all.

We have realized these ideals in profound ways that have ennobled the human spirit, elevated the human condition and made America an inspiration to the world.

We have fallen short of these ideals in profound ways that have inflicted immeasurable cruelty, suffering and injustice.

Owning both this light and this darkness as our shared story, we must now confront and redress our failures, celebrate and build on our successes and, in love, take up the great bridging work of bringing forth a new birth of American democracy.

Now, during the National Week of Conversation, is a great time to set aside our fears and to take the risk of beginning to love our fellow Americans.

I hope you will join me there to begin this journey together.

Bob Boisture is president and CEO of the Fetzer Institute.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: National Week of Conversation: How to not fear your fellow Americans