How to mix red and blue
How can we expect Americans to understand the rest of the world when last week's presidential election indicates that they do not even understand one another? Indeed, the country is arguably split into two de facto nations, symbolised on those ubiquitous electoral maps by the red states - which are loyal to the social and religious conservatism of President George W. Bush - and the blue states - which represent the relative liberalism of John Kerry.
A quick glance at such a map makes it clear that something needs to be done to introduce 'red' America to 'blue' America in the hope of fostering better understanding.
Inspired by an international teacher exchange programme in which I took part last year - one that took me and my family to rural Northfield, Massachusetts, and brought a Northfield family to Hong Kong - I offer a suggestion that I think Mr Bush would be wise to take up: the US government should start a national citizen exchange programme, mandating that at some point during their lifetime, residents of red and blue states must trade places for at least one year.
The American Citizens Exchange Initiative would work in the same manner as my teacher exchange - which resulted in breakthrough political and cultural insights on both sides. The parties involved would take only what they could carry and swap everything else - jobs, houses, furniture, pets and books, for example.
The success of the initiative rests on the assumption (with which I am sure most Americans will agree) that the differences between life in Hong Kong and Northfield are roughly equal to the differences between, say, living in San Francisco and taking up residence in any one of those red-coloured hamlets in the American south and heartland. For example, what is more difficult - learning to speak Cantonese or - as in some evangelical red zones in the US - speaking in tongues?
If Americans can learn half as much about their countrymen as my exchange partner and I learned about each other in our year of trading places, then these next four years under Mr Bush will be a period of unity unprecedented in the nation's recent memory.
It is a lot easier to empathise with a fellow when you are living under his roof and sleeping in his bed. Try paying his bills, working with his colleagues and gossiping with his neighbours. Suddenly, politics does not matter much, but human beings do - flawed human beings with flawed belief systems based more often than not on ignorance and prejudice.
Black versus white, gay versus straight, Christian versus non-Christian, pro-life versus pro-choice - the list of antipathies runs long and deep in the US. For some of us, empathy can be an entirely mental exercise; an act of imagination that allows us to climb into another person's skin and culture and to think and feel the way that person might without actually moving beyond our own doorstep. In the polarised America of today, however, such leaps of imagination are rare, and it is time to take more drastic measures.
Kent Ewing is a teacher at Hong Kong International School
