As you have pointed out, there are deep political and economic divisions as well as moral divsions. And really, those articles are mostly to convince people that they are out of the loop if they don't jump on the transformation bandwagon. I don't believe them for an instant. If you read religious publications you would find articles and polls saying the exact opposite.
Post some of them, please.
If you saw the right to life march this past weekend you would wonder where the support for legal abortions went.
No, I would only have it confirmed that a substantial minority of the population is anti-choice on that issue, and some of them are quite vehement about it. I already knew that.
So, we have moral and religious divisions. Economic and political divisions. We have nothing. There is no point on which compromise can be reached on any level at all. It isn't like this is uncharted territory, this has all happened before.
Yes: in our own history. I know you meant something different, but unlike the "cycle of civilizations" claptrap, what I'm saying here is actually demonstrable. We were divided enough at one point to fight a civil war. But there was a pretty clear majority on the issues of the time, and it was on the side that won the war (because it had more people and more resources). We have been divided in the past about votes for women, about civil rights, about labor versus capital and whether the government should intervene in the economy. We have been divided about many things, as much as we are divided now, or more so. Yet we came together, one side won the argument, and we prevailed. I see no reason to expect differently today.
What we face today, at this time, is a political and economic divide, but not a moral one, because we have already resolved that. This is how our story proceeds. At one time we have a period of upheaval centering around culture, values, morality, religion, and art. Some 40 yeas later, we have a period of civic upheaval centering around government, economics, foreign policy. By the time that period of civic upheaval comes along, the issues that divided us in the cultural upheaval are for the most part resolved. We had the Great Awakening in the 1730s-40s, and then the Revolutionary War and Constitution debate in the 1770s-80s. We had the Second Great Awakening in the 1820s-30s, and then the Civil War and Reconstruction in the 1860s-70s. We had the upheaval over the labor movement, early feminism, and temperance, which might be called the Third Great Awakening, in the 1890s-1900s, and then the Great Depression and World war II in the 1930s-40s. And now we have had the Fourth Awakening in the 1960s-70s, and are in the early stages of another crisis era.
We will resolve this. We are not in nearly as much danger today as we were in the 1860s. We are at least not putting armies in the field and fighting battles in which 30% casualty rates are the norm. And the issues in dispute, the main things we are arguing about now, are income gaps, the corrupting influence of money on politics, the energy economy of the future, and whether we can maintain the empire. We are no longer putting a lot of force and fury into arguing about gay rights or abortion or any of the other issues of the religious right. Those are, except for a few niggling details, settled.
I am not afraid. Why should I be? My side has won.
