At a time when we are approaching the midterms in a country so wildly divided, I think it is worth pausing. Just for a moment. To remember something.
We have been here before. Not just as a country, but as human beings who share something deeper than any ballot or bumper sticker or BS item inside the algorithmic feed.
I’m thinking about a morning on a commuter train into Manhattan described to me in the Wall Street journal this morning by Peggy Noonan. The skyline came into view the way it always did, the gleam of downtown in the sunlight, and everyone turned as they always did to admire the scene. Only that morning there was no skyline. There was a debris cloud where the towers had been. And from everyone in that car came a soft collective sigh, a groan, an *ohhhhhhh*.
There was a big man, a union guy, tough, standing in the middle of the car. He looked with everyone else, and then he lowered himself to a seat and began to cry.
That sound. That moment. That is what I want to hold onto right now.
As Peggy pointed out in her column and that I learned for the first time, It reminds us of another sound, from another terrible division in this country's history. On July 3, 1913, fifty thousand men came back to Gettysburg for the fiftieth anniversary of the battle. They were in their seventies and eighties. They came in their old uniforms. They reenacted Pickett's Charge, and something cathartic and real and noble happened that nobody had planned for.
The old Confederates came out of the tree line and began making their way up the long slope. The Union soldiers waited for them at the famous stone fence, the same place they had waited fifty years before. And as they watched the Confederates struggle forward in their doomed charge, the Union soldiers made a sound. David McCullough called it, in Ken Burns's documentary on the Civil War, "a gigantic gasp of unbelief."
It was a sound of pity and awe. A sound that said this is human tragedy. The Union soldiers found themselves unable to reenact defeating them. They crossed the fence and embraced them instead.
I keep coming back to this moment, and I’ve spent my own time on this hallowed ground. It moves you in important ways. And Fifty years after one of the bloodiest, most bitterly fought divisions this country has ever known, men on opposite sides of it looked at each other across that slope and felt something that crossed every line that had separated them. Not strategy, not ideology, not grievance. Just the recognition of shared suffering. Shared humanity.
We are a long way from that right now. I know it. Every conversation at every dinner table, every scroll through the feed, every exchange in the comment section tells you how far. And I am not going to stand here and pretend the disagreements are not real, or that the stakes are not high, or that we can all just hug it out and go home.
But I do think we are capable of that soulful sound. That *ohhhhhh*. That involuntary, unguarded moment when you look at another human being and recognize the weight they are carrying, even if you have spent months telling yourself they are the enemy.
Because no matter what, life goes on. Children are born. Sons become fathers. The years pile up and fill you with more than you expected, in the best possible way. But you carry the losses too. Always and forever. The scarred rings in the trunk of the tree that never go away, even when the tree keeps growing. Someone asks you someday what happened there, and you tell them. Because telling the truth about the things that broke your heart is how you keep faith with the people and the moments that mattered.
That is what I think we owe each other right now, across every divide. The willingness to look at the person on the other side of this and hear the *ohhhhh* in our own chest. The recognition that they are carrying something too. That this country is not just an argument. It is a shared inheritance, shaped by everything that broke us and everything we built anyway.
The Union soldiers didn't agree with the Confederates. They didn't pretend the war hadn't happened. They crossed a stone fence and put their arms around men who had once tried to kill them, because in that moment the human thing was bigger than the political thing.
We have done that before. We can find our way back to it again. I know we can…