Voices: We are better than our politics

If everything you knew about this country arrived during this election cycle, you might have a dim view of America. The hangover that followed the first presidential debate only reinforces the view that our republic is fractured. We talk and don’t listen, and the volume of our dialogue swells to match our convictions.

Outside of the partisan rancor, though, decent citizens are merely going about their lives, but with little time to learn about or understand those who have lived very different experiences, whether because of race, culture, religion, gender or even geography. Much of our cultural divide and tribalism is exacerbated by our tendency — made worse by technology — to cling to a myopic view of the world.

So what would happen if you spent 12 minutes engaging a stranger — someone who on the surface might have little in common with you?

Recently, I found out via a soul-baring exchange with my Uber driver during a quick hop across Washington, D.C. What might a Christian man raised in Texas learn from a Muslim woman who just arrived from New York?

My driver, Binafshah Hussan, pulled up in her Toyota Camry and greeted me with a smile. After exchanging the usual pleasantries, she said she was new to the nation’s capital, a transplant after 18 years in New York.

“What brought you here?” I asked.

She paused.

“I lost my husband to lung cancer,” she said. “Nov. 28 of last year.”

Her husband was diagnosed a month before he died. You could feel the weight of the world as she described his hospital room, just the two of them trying to reconcile themselves to his fate. Binafshah said her husband was talking to people who were not there, friends and relatives who — she would later learn — had died years earlier. He asked her to grab tea and sandwiches for all of those gathered. She just listened.

I asked about her children. She has a 15-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter. I felt a lump in my throat, and I told her that my father died when I was 10, and that she should know that her children are seeing her in a powerful new way. Her strength is lifting them, even if she can’t see it. My own mother’s resilience still inspires me.

“They call me Super Mom,” she said. “I love that name.”

Super Mom also has lupus, a point relayed matter-of-factly, just another burden carried gracefully.

I asked her how she had settled in to D.C. Her voice lifted as she talked about the support in her new neighborhood.

“I’m Muslim, but the Christians in my community have been incredible. Picking up my kids, teaching them, helping me when I’m working.”

I told her that I suspected Ramadan and other holidays would be particularly difficult. She nodded. “My husband always would prepare the food.”

I knew what she was in for. My father had died a month before Thanksgiving, and the pain of that day was searing. Decades later, I can still see the scene at our dinner table: my siblings’ hollow eyes, blank and lifeless stares.

“I realize this is difficult to imagine today,” I told her, “but you’ll create new traditions at Ramadan that will honor your husband and God as well.”

She smiled. Yes, the kids would surely help, she said.

“What will really be difficult, though, is that he died on our anniversary,” she said.

I told her life gives you what you can handle and that she’ll find a way through her faith to become whole again. The once-joyous day, I told her, will one day be joyful again. She must believe that.

A ride that was only 1.7 miles long and lasted a mere 12 minutes was a gift. Binafshah gave me a glimpse of her life, which in many ways reflected my own.

It’s too easy to believe that we are all so different, defined by our skin color, our gender, our faith and, yes, our politics. That we are an angry and fragmented people. But the truth is, we all wear life’s scars, hide our burdens and are weighted by our own shortcomings and insecurities. Our journeys are not all that different, and the human experience will unite us — if we’ll let it — even as this election has pulled us apart.

That Uber ride reaffirmed something I already knew: We are better than our politics.

Siniff, a former editor at Paste BN, works at Subject Matter, a communications firm in Washington, D.C. He can be reached @jmsiniff on Twitter.