Before We Tear
It Down

I keep hearing the same seven words. On the radio, in line at the hardware store, in the comment sections where people go to be angry at strangers. We need to tear it all down.

I don't think the people who say it are fools. Most of them are tired, and some have good reason to be. But every time I hear it, I want to ask a few things before anyone reaches for the sledgehammer. What, exactly, is “it”? What goes up in its place? How do we know which parts are rotten and which ones are holding up the roof? A man who guts a house without checking the load-bearing walls usually learns something, and he usually learns it from underneath.

I am not arguing that the country should stay as it is. America has failed people, and not in small ways. Some of those failures were written into law and enforced by men with badges. Others were quieter and lasted longer. They deserve to be looked at plainly, without a speech about how everyone else was worse. If loving a country means lying about it, that love won't hold much when weight is put on it.

Criticism and contempt sound alike when people are shouting, but they are different things, and so are gratitude and denial. I have known men who could tell you everything wrong with the service and would still have gone back for any one of the people beside them. That isn't a contradiction. It's what it looks like to know something well.

Most of our arguments about the country run three separate questions together. What happened is one of them, and it can usually be checked: a date, a vote count, a dollar figure, a document. What it means is another, and honest people will read it differently. What we ought to do about it is a judgment that draws on our values as much as our facts. Disagreement about meaning doesn't turn every fact into opinion, and having the facts in hand doesn't hand anyone the answer. Both mistakes are common because both are convenient. Each one lets us skip the hard part.

Every side in this country claims to be telling the truth. I have yet to meet the person who believed he was the liar in the room. So the question that matters isn't which side owns the truth. It's whether we still share any way of checking.

When people are cornered in these arguments, they ask who decides. Nobody does, by authority alone. Not a party or a president, not a crowd, not a newspaper or a university. A thing is not true because enough people raised their hands. We find out by looking at the evidence, asking where it came from and how it was gathered, and letting someone else take a run at it. Experts help with that work, and so do institutions, and both have been wrong before and will be again. They earn their trust by showing their work and fixing their mistakes where people can see.

You don't have to be an expert to hold up your end of this. You only have to ask the same questions of the people you agree with that you ask of the people you don't. Most of us are good at the second half.

A free country has always held deep disagreements. That was never the danger. The trouble starts when we stop asking whether our own claims hold up. Evidence that helps us gets passed around, and evidence that hurts us gets called a lie. Someone admits a mistake and it's treated as surrender. Someone asks a question and it's taken as proof of which team they're on.

I won't pretend every side does this in equal measure, or that every dispute comes with two equally sound stories. Sometimes one account is far better supported than the other, and saying so is part of the job. The test still has to be the same for everybody. A scale that only weighs your opponents isn't a scale.

Holding to that test is harder than it sounds, because the pressure to drop it rarely shows up as an argument. It shows up as a person who is sure of himself and wants you to be sure too. I learned something about that a long time ago, before I had any words for it.

When I was nineteen I stood guard at a gate in Turkey. It was around three in the morning, the hour when a post goes quiet and your mind starts drifting toward home. A truck rolled up, a technical, with an M60 machine gun mounted in the bed. A Turkish NCO was aboard, armed, and he wanted in.

My orders were plain. No one passes. I told him so, keyed the radio and called the Security Alert Team. Then we stood there for several minutes that did not feel like several minutes, the engine idling, the gun in the bed of the truck, the NCO making it clear in a voice that kept losing patience that he expected the gate to open.

I wasn't brave. I was a kid who had been told what the post was for, and an angry man with a machine gun behind him didn't change it. He was more certain than I was about nearly everything that night. The loudest voice at that gate belonged to him. It wasn't the one I answered to.

That night the order was written down for me. A citizen doesn't get orders that clear. We have to work out for ourselves what we'll accept as true and what we'll do about it, and the confident voice pressing on us usually isn't a stranger in a truck. More often it's a neighbor, or a friend, or our own side.

Freedom gives us room for that work. It lets us speak and argue, question the people in charge, worship and gather and choose for ourselves. Those protections are worth very little if we can't challenge a claim or ask how it was established. They also ask something back. A rumor passed along as fact can ruin a man's name or split a town down the middle. A true thing buried because it's inconvenient does its own slower damage. Honesty is something we demand from our leaders, and it is something we owe the person across the table, including the one we can't stand.

So back to the people who want to tear it all down. Their anger is often earned, and I don't want to wave it off. But anger can start a repair and can't finish one. Somewhere along the way someone has to say what, specifically, is broken and who was hurt by it. Someone has to decide what needs to change, what ought to be left standing, and what goes into the space we clear. A country isn't the sum of its worst days, and it can't be defended by reciting only its best ones. Honest love keeps both in view, and it gets tiring, and it is the only kind that's any use.

We won't hand the next generation a flawless country. Nobody ever has. What we can hand them is a more truthful account of the one they're getting, freedoms that still work when they're used, and some memory of people who were willing to fix what they complained about. They will disagree with us. They should. What I worry about is whether they'll inherit a place where evidence still counts for something, where two people can argue hard over what a fact means without the fact itself disappearing between them.

Tear it all down. Maybe some of it should come down. But before we start swinging, it seems fair to ask what we're willing to build, and what we're willing to protect while we build it. If we can't agree on what's true, I don't know how we'll ever agree on what's broken, or what's worth saving.

I still think about those minutes at the gate. The engine idling, the gun in the bed of the truck, and the order I'd been given, which was the one thing out there I was sure of.