Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

It’s hard to tell these days whether to believe that we’re “more divided than ever” or that we’re “not as divided as we think we are.” One thing is for sure, though: no easy solutions are popping up. Of the people around me in my daily life, most seem to have an opinion about this. Frankly, I can tell that most of that most are either guessing or just repeating what they hear everyone else say. I don’t think any of us really know.

What got me thinking about this was an article in Commonweal last spring titled “Where Politics is Still Possible.” When I saw it, I thought, Still possible? In a democracy, politics has to be possible! Reading beyond the title – an uncommon act in itself – I found writer Jonathon Malesic focusing on students at several smaller US colleges and universities whose civics courses are steeped in real-world scenarios. Acknowledging the ups and downs, we read that many of the students he met were apathetic about politics, yet the demographics of these smaller schools often included more non-traditional students, which broadened the experience for everyone. So, were the students divided? Not exactly. Malesic writes, “Over and over, students told me that their policy views do not line up with either of the major political parties. This does not mean they are all centrists, just that their leanings are often complex.” He seems to point to the same conclusion that I have come to: we’re not so much divided as scattered. And while some Americans decry college as useless or rattle sabers about brainwashing, his article reminds us of this: “College is not the only place people can learn democratic participation; labor unions and civic organizations are such places, too. But college offers a rare combination of factual knowledge, skill-building, and pluralism that can form highly engaged citizen-leaders.”

Educating ourselves can help to clear a path out of this frustration. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that politics is a “practical science [ . . . ] since it is concerned with the noble action or happiness of the citizens.” The adjective practical comes from the word practice, which in English is both a noun and a verb. In either form, it implies a hands-on kind of utility that is in-action. The practice of politics cannot occur among people who are passive, neglectful, or ignorant, because none of those traits can lead to “noble action” or to the “happiness of the citizens.” Calling it a science implies a foundation in empirical reality and a willingness to accept new, previously undiscovered facts within the process of improving our knowledge, and thus improving our lives. Politics, at its best, should welcome new knowledge through active participation in a hands-on process. That is how things can get better.

And even though we have no shortage of people wanting to get radical, one of the worst ideas that we can entertain is to throw out everything and start fresh. If we go back to the colonial days, the United States has more than three centuries of tradition, wisdom, precedent, and lived experience to work with. Some of it is ugly, painful, and shameful. Much of it is useful. The questions now are not “should it have happened?” or “who is to blame?” but “what can we learn from it?” One of my favorite writers, Alabama native Albert Murray, put it this way, speaking to students at Howard University in 1978:

But the primary concern of revolution is not destruction but the creation of better procedures and institutions. All too often being a rebel means only that you’re against something. Whereas being a revolutionary should mean that you are against something because you are for something better. Indeed, primarily because you are for something better. [ . . . ] You reject that which is unproductive or counterproductive. But you don’t reduce everything to rejection and rebellion, because the whole idea of life, which is to say the process of living and continuing to exist, is affirmation. The whole idea of education is to find the terms and meanings that make fruitful continuity possible.

“The whole idea of” politics might also be “to find the terms and meanings that make fruitful continuity possible.” This modern problem of whether politics is still possible has a much better chance of being resolved when people and communities are less interested in what they are against and more interested in what they are for. The question, riffing off of Murray, could be: what are we trying to affirm?

Thinking about what I’m for, several things come to mind. I’m for finding solutions with each other, for real and in-person, not through governments and politicians. I’m for helping people see that the interests of the powerful are not actually the interests of all people. I’m for organizing ourselves in ways and in groups that don’t include a political party. I’m for recognizing the limitations and the dangers of social media and other “online communities.” Related to that, I’m also for establishing rules making social media companies, email providers, and other web-based businesses require legal and verifiable forms of identity to have an account, in the same way that banks, courts, schools, and utilities do. Community and politics are both built upon trust, and trust can’t be built upon political agendas and false identities. Changes like that could reduce the cognitive dissonance that leads to distrust. Which, if we truly are divided, is the real problem at the root of it all.