Brookings pastor Kline: We face a choice. We can continue to fight amongst ourselves and fail, or work together and succeed

Some years ago there was a game show on TV called “Friend or Foe.”

Two contestants would start out working together to amass as much money as possible. Once they had gathered as much as they could, they were asked to decide whether the other was a “friend” or “foe.” If they both said “friend,” they split the cash. If they both said “foe,”neither got anything. If one said “friend” and the other said “foe,” the latter got all the money.

Those who wanted it all, decided they had nothing to lose if they said “foe.” They would either leave the show with the same bank account as before, or a new and substantial windfall. Even though they had worked together in a positive way to build up the pot, as friends, that friendship disappeared with the prospect of individual reward and wealth.

These days, our life as a nation is a lot like the game show. Seldom are we friends, and share the results of our labor together. Oftentimes, we can’t even work together to build that mutual reward (a situation depicted in the public domain Civil War era cartoon above, posted on wikimedia commons). 

We begin as foes, work at cross purposes as foes, rail against our foes, and move against our foes with greater and greater antipathy, even violence. There is no mutual reward! We leave the game poorer than before!

In the last few days, I’ve heard more than one person say they can’t talk to a family member anymore. A lifetime of friendship has turned into a wall of discord and contention. They have gone from friend to foe, all because of a political pot of power and control, with no longer a possibility of mutual reward.

You can’t split the presidency, and progressively, a two-party political system chooses foes, instead of crossing over the aisle for friends and the welfare of the republic. A recent example in Congress was the revisiting of a bipartisan plan to deal with the issue of a secure border. It has become so contentious, even the original Republican participant in writing it, voted against it, and both parties blamed the other party for using the bill as propaganda.

Both our South Dakota senators voted against it, and one suspects they certainly won’t want to revisit the subject till after the November election. They certainly won’t want to initiate and write a new bill with colleagues. Democrats and a Democratic administration are foes, and if the country has to lose out, so be it.

During my high school years, there were two people I encountered one might call foes. One was a bully. His height and weight were such that he hovered over most of us, a threat simply in appearance. One day, for a reason long since forgotten (if there was one), he started taunting me and shoving me around. Perhaps unwisely, I resisted and started pushing him back, making it clear there was no retreat. He soon backed off and never tried to bully me again.

We didn’t become what I would call friends, but there was a sense of mutual respect and we shared in activities without incident, certainly not as foes.

The second person was the most ferocious member of our football team. We had a mutual friend. I believe he felt I was becoming a “best” friend of that mutual friend, and that jealousy led him to throw me down the steps of his house one night in the midst of a party.

He had been drinking, as had I (fortunately), as I bounced on the sidewalk rather than broke. He was only a potential foe when he was drinking, otherwise, we were friends. Bullies and those who are drunk (with alcohol, or with power and wealth), can quickly turn friends into foes, depending on their mood or sense of threat.

Standing up to these violent bullies, either by force of will or with understanding, is possible, and can turn those foes into friends.

There are choices! We can continue to allow politics to divide us, make us into foes, so that neither side gains anything, and we all are losers in the end. Or we can choose to work as friends, splitting the credit or the rewards, and moving ahead with the greater good.

Let the bullies and the violent be met with honesty and integrity, not fear and retreat. Let us be persistent in our efforts to identify what unites us, not what separates us.

It’s not a game of “Friend or Foe.” It’s our country! It’s our life together!

Carl Kline of Brookings is a United Church of Christ clergyman and adjunct faculty member at the Mt. Marty College campus in Watertown. He is a founder and on the planning committee of the Brookings Interfaith Council, co-founder of Nonviolent Alternatives, a small not-for-profit that, for 15 years, provided intercultural experiences with Lakota/Dakota people in the Northern Plains and brought conflict resolution and peer mediation programs to schools around the region. He was one of the early participants in the development of Peace Brigades International. Kline can be reached at carl@satyagrahainstitute.org. This column originally appeared in the Brookings Register.