Two Americas, or We’re Not All In This Together
As we head toward winter, Wave Three of coronavirus, and an election that our fearless leader has already signaled he won’t accept the results of (unless he wins, of course), uncertainty abounds on all sides. One thing is clear, though: the political rift dividing our country has only deepened and widened from all this. We’re not coming together as a nation, and it’s highly unlikely anything short of an Independence Day-style alien attack will bring us together.
If you’ve read any of my posts over the past seven months, you may have picked up that this is a pet topic of mine. I don’t have a great explanation for that, other than it seems like such a contrast from the America I grew up in. Now, I grew up with Watergate, so I’m used to major controversy and the Liberal/Conservative divide. But things seemed very different back then, maybe in part because I was a child at the time, but I think it’s more than just that. I think most Americans, regardless of the politics they subscribed to, desired unity and believed in the two-party system. They saw and felt the tension between the two sides but didn’t take it personally, and generally a person’s politics had very little to do with their identity (there were exceptions, of course; I’m talking generally). More often than not, circles of family and friends included individuals from extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum, but the altercations if any were purely verbal…All in the Family was a great illustration of this common phenomenon.
Nowadays, one’s political affiliation is everything. It determines to a large extent what kind of “truth” you hear every day (FOX News versus NPR), what you watch for entertainment (NASCAR versus soccer), and what sort of greater reality you believe we all live in (conspiracy theories versus science/reason). Stupidly, it more or less dictates whether you want to do anything to slow the spread of COVID-19 (maskless Covid parties versus masks & distancing). I can walk down my street, look at someone coming the other way, and tell from 50 yards whether they lean Republican or Democrat, just by whether they “mask up” or not.
Because political affiliation is such a big part of our identities today, we get angry, offended, hurt, and upset like never before when someone expresses views that don’t agree with ours. The dialogues escalate and get personal more rapidly than a coronavirus U.S. case graph. Because of this, people on each side tend to stick with their own kind. You don’t see a lot of mixing/mingling of red and blue these days at all. This is good for avoiding shouting matches and fistfights (or worse), but not so good for each of us enriching our worldview. It seems that the more we hear from people that agree wholeheartedly with us, the more validated we feel in our set opinions, and the less willing we are to listen to views that don’t align perfectly but might give us additional insights and angles.
I see all of this happening, but don’t know what to do about it. Maybe I can try to be an example for others. Maybe the divide needs to get worse before it can be made better.
Bike Newbie 