All-In for We’re Better United

Nearly 80 percent of Americans strongly agree we’re better united than divided.  Most of the remaining 20 percent somewhat agree.  Many substantiate their support with comments that in one way or another call for us to act in common, be united, come together.

This amidst the gloom that division is all around us.  Everything seems to be politicized, from school boards to public health officials to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The nation is divided on major issues such as gun control, immigration and climate change, and we don’t have a way, or the will, to solve them.   We watch discord in Washington, D.C., and experience it in our own backyard.  Against this backdrop, anything to the contrary defies imagination.

Except the results of the surveys* conducted for Our Common Purpose are consistent and unwavering.  Four out of every five voters strongly agree we’re better united than divided.  Democrats, Republicans and independents strongly agree in near equal percentages.  The agreement hasn’t wavered even during the worst of the past two years.

In an environment of inflammatory rhetoric, disinformation, contentious state legislation, all the uglies we face today, the poll results provide an encouraging message.  Average Americans like you and I aspire to something different, better, more than we are getting today.  The only catch being if that we want different-better-more, then we need to do different, better, more than we are doing today.

The comments gathered in the course of taking the surveys, presented here as Voices of America, add up to three objectives for we citizens that, simple as they sound, need to be stated as such.  More to come in this space on each of the following.  We need to:

— Raise up what unites us.

— Face down what divides us.

— Recognize that it’s on us to build unity together.

Granted it’s one thing to state objectives, quite another to make actual progress.  We can’t though stand idly by without trying.

* A series of seven nationwide polls were conducted by Survey USA in a 30-month period from June 2020 to January 2023.