So I'm sick...a cold, flu....who knows. As usual not sure where I may have picked this up but I'm highly suspect of a Nat sneeze six days ago that was point blank into my open mouth. So what!...where it came from is irrelevant. But sure does blur my thinking and sets me up for negative conclusions. So why would I sit down to write in that frame of mind? No good answer except to say that perhaps it will reveal something to me about me which may sound like a pretty dubious reason to plow ahead. Nonetheless, I plow ahead.
The division of the US populace is just so rampant now that the election is over. I see that I am tiptoeing around in my chats with others for fear of making a mortal enemy by saying the wrong thing. Rationality has lost it's universal meaning altogether. It now seems to be defined as 'my position is obviously rational and so is yours if you agree with me. If you see it a different way, I am your eternal enemy and I will work tirelessly to bring you down'! Geesh! Social chaos is loose upon the land!
Being old provides me a perspective of past decades where this level of national animosity just didn't seem as extreme. Still, an age old maxim of not discussing religion or politics in public has been around forever so much of this rancor is not exactly a brand new phenomenon. It's the severity of it, the all or nothing, good guys/very bad guys, the 'enemy within' dynamic that is being brandished as a sharp machete in a field of regular citizens who now come emotionally unhinged with little prompting.
So Santiago, are you proposing some kind of solution to all of this? Of course not, only trying to speak from my heart and begin to process the swirl of mental and emotional mayhem that is the water I find myself swimming in.
A two party system is still in operation today. You have your liberal/progressive camp and the conservative camp. Both sides operate within a spectrum ranging from moderate/centrist/extreme positions. It seems today's consensus is that both parties have taken on a voice that has become quite extreme. It's common to hear both moderates and centrists from both sides lament that they virtually don't recognize the current dynamics of their traditional party.
For some years now I have considered myself an independent. Each party has a wide-ranging platform that bundle the party positions together in a package they promote as the way to go. It's like cable TV packages. In order to get your favorite couple of channels, you are forced to sign up for a package containing 18 channels you have no interest in. Today's voters with specific party allegiance are forced to do the same.
The current cultural clouds are further complicated with the fact that mainstream media has aligned themselves with one party or the other. Truly 'independent', 'balanced' news today is as rare as hen's teeth. The American news viewers of today receive only the decidedly biased reports of the news agency affiliated with their party politics. Across the land, the average news watching citizen tunes into their officially approved news channel and suck from the bottle of pre-approved, party rhetoric that does a good job of promoting groupthink along party ideologies. Of course this is all done in a very subtle, well-worded manner guaranteed not to catch the attention of the eagerly nodding heads of the channel's viewers.
And then there is the Hatfield/McCoy syndrome that keeps the respective animosity levels at fever pitch. The current election is over. My 96 year old aunt, who like me did not vote for the winner, uttered this comment (now suitable for the Smithsonian): " Well now its time to get over it and support the new President for the good of the country". Bless her heart but her comment now could be listed as an example of what is meant by the word anachronism.
In the past, a brief episode of licking wounds and then coming back to do our individual part to support national sanity was more the coin of the realm. What about now? Now it's time for the losing party to take to the mattresses, to organize a massive resistance movement and to utilize the courts to tie up the incoming party in an endless cloud of legal maneuverings designed to paralyze any and all efforts of the challengers. Impeachment anyone?
I wonder just how balanced good ol' Walther Cronkite actually was. Regardless, he signed off each night with a phrase that seems appropriate here: "And that's the way it is." Or is that just how it seems to be to me and probably not to you?
