Riding my bike across the Gordie Howe International Bridge shortly after it opened reinforced the shreds of hope I retain for a return to civility in public life.
I’m no Pollyanna, and this might seem like a lot to get out of a short jaunt connecting industrial portions of two old cities at the epicenter of Donald Trump’s trade war with our longtime economic partner. But the smiles and instant camaraderie among people I encountered along the way match my experiences visiting U.S. red states in the year since I retired.
Travels to Alaska, South Carolina and Kentucky to run half marathons, and visits to South Dakota, Wyoming and my native Nebraska inspired this thought: America is divided, but Americans are not. That’s an intentional overstatement,
but we’re not nearly as divided as news and social media portray, and are much, much less so when we are face to face.
Americans never have and never will agree on everything, of course, and a bevy of opportunists benefit from exploiting these differences. Foreign adversaries run disinformation campaigns. Social media algorithms increase engagement by keeping us angry. Media, from legacy outlets to propaganda channels masquerading as news, know that clickbait headlines suck us in. The more our blood boils the better for them, the worse for us and our neighbors.
Politicians, rather than seeking compromise and solution, also benefit from exacerbating division, a disheartening reality that I witnessed firsthand as an editor/publisher in western Colorado, where immigrants, here legally or not, make up a third or more of the workforce. I heard Democrats and Republicans whose state would greatly benefit from immigration reform say this: We must secure the border, bolster immigration courts and create a realistic pathway to citizenship for families contributing to our society and economy. It sounded like agreement, but when I asked why that reform wasn’t moving through Congress, politicians on both sides said it was because of the other side.
Immigration is just one such issue, with health care costs and Social Security’s solvency being among myriad others. As long as there’s no solution, both parties can keep vilifying the other, trying to win votes. Whatever can we say in our attack ads say if we actually reach agreement?
My travels in the past year, including the bike ride to Canada, tell me that we can disengage, think for ourselves and find our civility – our humanity. It’s not too late.
This wild notion struck me waiting for the start of the Anchorage Half Marathon on the day of the summer solstice in 2025. I chatted with a woman from Louisiana and a guy from Montana, red states that voted for Donald Trump a few months before. We talked about our Alaska highlights so far, about races we enjoyed in other states, about the indignities of air travel in the 2020s.
In the afternoon, Anchorage’s solstice festival drew people from all over the country who were there to get a taste of round-the-clock daylight. People who no doubt have wildly divergent political views were too busy having fun and enjoying the unique experience to fret about politics.
It was the same on the bridge. People were walking and biking in each direction, making it impossible to tell U.S. residents from Canadians.
The acrimony Donald Trump has injected into our neighborly relations with Canada and Windsor was set aside. I didn’t see a MAGA hat or an anti-Trump shirt or anything remotely political. Trump made us all wait several months after the Gordie was finished to have this moment, but once we were able to enjoy the free bike-pedestrian crossing, we were absorbed in the novel experience.
In addition to my guest columns for the Free Press, I write occasionally on U.S. politics for the Windsor Star. Canadian readers have let me know just how unhappy they are with Trump’s policies and rhetoric. They also have made clear that they aren’t willing to let Americans (like me) off the hook who say, hey, it’s only some of us who brought this about. As a society, we elected him twice, so Canadians (and others around the world) see Trumpism as an enduring feature of U.S. politics, not just a dark passing phase.
My experience, from the bridge crossing and otherwise, is that Canadians remain polite to Americans in person despite their anger and sense of betrayal toward U.S. policy.
I believe we can make real progress toward behaving that way on this side of the border, trying to be civil despite our differences. A big step in that process is asking ourselves who benefits from our division. It’s not us folks on Main Street or atop the Gordie Howe Bridge.
It’s the foreign actors with false accounts, faux news outlets with ulterior motives, fake social media posts and cynical politicians. It’s businesses that extract profit from fear and chaos.
Can a bridge solve this? Of course not.
But if we are waiting for some healing leader to bring us together, we’ll be disappointed. It’s on us to build more new bridges.
Randy Essex is a retired journalist who covered and edited business and political news, including at the Free Press, across five decades.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: A bike ride across the Gordie Howe bridge gave me hope for civility
