From the Mouths of Teens

By the Election of 1860, America was polarized well beyond the sectionalism that had long existed.

Lincoln was a moderate; he was a figure that could potentially serve as a funnel through which two solutions could be poured. The resulting concoction America can only imagine. “For the polarized sides, ideas must be funneled down into ideas on which both sides will agree.” Our leaders must serve as “filters” of extreme ideas, promoting instead ideas of moderating reason.

Before his inauguration in March, South Carolina and six other states had already seceded because “change that appears to favor one side of a polarized nation cannot exist. Although Lincoln believed that slavery was an immoral system based on greed, he did not plan to abolish slavery.” Lincoln did not believe that blacks and whites should share equal footing.

Despite this, “a peaceful bond cannot exist between two sides of a nation when there isn’t a satisfying equilibrium achieved.” Sides were drawn, alternate teams were formed and citizens of one nation began to show an allegiance to their team rather than their nation. When an alternate allegiance and “a stubbornness is initiated, you might as well be preaching to a deaf crowd.”

“A disagreement of two people separated by an ocean will only end if a reasonable man will come to build a bridge. At a time when civil war was about to break, the people had taken sides and lost their willingness to reason and to compromise.”

We value democracy but do we understand democratic leadership? A democracy must be characterized by democratic leadership which values “change that meets somewhere in the middle.”

The moral of the story is that one must “be reasonable in unreasonable situations.”