I explained my asking why you thought I was Wayne or Wade or whoever your imaginary friend is. I regret adding to your already profound confusion. I'm not going to go on denyng your strange and to my eyes unfounded obsession with this former acquaintance. It ain't me.
I did watch Sean Hannity tonight and it caused me to think that the reason for our protracted dialogue of the deaf is sadder and more profound than just a different perspective on current events. We are citizens of different countries. I belong to the United States of Canada and you are a proud member of Jesusland. The national unity that was so strong at the end of WWII is tearing apart in a way that it hasn't since the Civil War. But unlike that long-ago division, we are in each other's faces and on each other's TV screens day in and day out. We think we are one family, that we understand each other. But we don't.
I say without condescension that we are today's quebecquois looking at rural French speakers in Maine or a citizen from Eire meeting his long-lost cousin from Boston. We recognize you - we used to have a common value system and a common frame of reference. But a gulf has opened between us. You live in one America, we in another. We have moved on. You still believe in a Divine Saviour who rose from the dead, the log cabin, the pioneer spirit, an America where any poor kid can rise to be president, an America whose spirit and liberty and standard of living are the envy of the world and a model for the less fortunate nations. Ronald Reagan and Frank Capra, Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle -- it's a world of certainties, of traditional values and social roles. I'm old enough to remember when the mailman came twice a day and cream rose to the top of milk bottles. I think I know where you are coming from.
But once we have left that world, we can't go back again. We accept evolution, relativity in science, relativity in ethics. We believe that some form of the modern welfare state is a necessary social condition for human dignity in a world of globalized technology. We revere our past but we acknowlege our faults. Whatever God there may or may not be, He isn't pulling the strings of providential design for America, His own very special land. We're just another world citizen, and a rather provincial and self-righteous one at that.
If we all recongnized that Red America and Blue America are different from each other the way Australia and Britain are different from each other, we'd respect each other more and we'd argue less. It's because we unconsciously assume that we are one people still that we are so hurt and so bitter as we judge each other. We expect more from family than neighbors. But we aren't family any more. We Blues are like the kids who come home from college and find Ma and Pa still living a life that is sweet and sincere but outmoded and cannot work for us now that we've seen something of the wide world. And it pissess us off to be treated like kids by people who we now see clearly don't get it.
My guess is that you will see the hurt in the responses to this post. There will be an immediate reaction of "Gotcha!" some name calling, a little childish twisting of what I have written in a way that you can tell seems unbeatably clever to the one who made it up. Then I'll be dismissed as crazy, as proof that citizens who disagree with you are inferior to you in wit and vision. You'll think you've solved the problem, burned the witch. It has to be that way, I'd guess; but then, if I had to explain it to you, you wouldn't understand.
