Peanut Butter, Chocolate, and Getting Along
Why can’t we all get along?
The anniversary of September 11, 2001, and yesterday’s horrific shooting and murder of Charlie Kirk, may his memory serve as a blessing, amplify the seriousness of our crisis of getting along.
The original opening of this piece was: “the idea of hegemony is a fallacy”.
And then Ginny, my spouse, told me that despite their accuracy, for the sake of clear communication, I must not use words like “hegemony” and “fallacy”.
Ginny is pretty much always correct, so, instead, I will use the idea raised in the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercial: “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter…you got your peanut butter in my chocolate!”[1]
The Reese’s people were onto something. Everyone prefers their own thing. While some prefer chocolate, and others peanut butter, others still choose peanut butter and chocolate combined, and even others are allergic to one or both of those, or find the entire project too sweet.
Personally, I can’t believe that people like chunky peanut butter cups and yet some people must love them because Reese’s still sells them.
None of these is better than the other - it is all just a matter of taste.
Twenty-four years after 9/11 and people still claim that entire countries should be “one way”. President George W. Bush’s words in the week following that awful day twenty-four years ago, “you are either with us or you are with the terrorists”[2] seem tame in comparison to a sitting US Senator claiming just last week that the United States was founded as a White Christian Homeland[3] in blatant contradiction to so much of what our Founders wrote and said and our founding documents proclaimed.
E Pluribus Unum – “out of many one” – the earliest motto of the United States[4], feels like more than the unification of 13 colonies into a new country. This motto serves as a call to the heart of the American project: that many peoples can form one multi-cultural nation. Today, this vision and hope seem greater challenges and perhaps more distant than ever.
At the root of this lies the toxic idea that one people, one idea about who we are, can dominate all the rest, and that such a unifying principle should dominate everything else. This is wrong.
As soon as any group narrows the definition of rightness and correctness to exclude other people as less than, as soon as a group defines their own goodness as exclusive and superior to all others’, they have shut the door on growth, on improvement, and on the all the strengths that have proven to succeed for us as people.
All good ideas improve through encountering differences.
All people, individuals and groups, grow and thrive through conversations and exchanges with those unlike them.
All nations do better when we share in a broad community that includes others who make us uncomfortable and force us to change for the better when our habits and norms confront different ways of thinking and doing.
The lessons of the American project, the importance of “out of many one”, the challenges of terror and assassination, and the war that inspired our Founders to create the Constitution that seeks to hold us together in peace by being amendable[5]:
All these must move us towards greater engagement with others near and far, more civil discourse, and more serious self-reflection on who we are and how we can contribute to more listening, learning, compassion, and eventually, understanding between all of us who may disagree, but who are strengthened most by our humble engagement with differences.
In the realms of chocolate and peanut butter, may we all find the sweet treat that suits us best and celebrate that others can do the same, even if our chosen desserts are different.
In the realm of our nation during troubling times, wishing everyone wholeness and well-being on this difficult day, both in the past and in the present.
[1] For those of you who haven’t seen it and can tolerate the cheesiness of 1982 advertising, here it is: https://youtu.be/rTTixlelryY?si=ltxHsUQsV_p7jqXV
[2] President declares “Freedom at war with fear”. (2001, November 21). Welcome to the White House. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html
[3] Shanes, J. (2025, September 5). A Senator just unapologetically declared the U.S. a white homeland. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/09/eric-schmitt-white-nationalism-national-conservatism-conference.html
[4] Kruse, K. M. (2015). One nation under God: How corporate America invented Christian America. Basic Books.
[5] Jill Lepore talks about this and her forthcoming book, We the people: a history of the U.S. Constitution, on this podcast: Lithwick, D. (2025, September 6). How to fix our broken constitution. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2025/09/the-constitutional-tool-america-needs-right-now