Poisonous Politics and a Country Divided, Welcome to America 2009
By Cristi Adkins Saturday, October 24, 2009
Arguably, the great divide between liberals and conservatives in America has never felt wider than now. This pronounced polarization has grown in the past few years at alarming rates and can no longer be considered election undertones. This energized division was actually examined by Bill Bishop, a reporter from Austin, and statistician, Bob Cushing. Their three year investigation revealed a chilling trend:
“There’s a steady trend line from ‘76 to 2004 of the country being pulled apart-becoming more politically segregated. We began to see this pattern that we eventually end up calling the Big Sort… It’s at that community level that people are becoming more segregated,” said Bishop.
The distinguishing idiosyncrasies in ‘party’ segregation has aroused not just a political feeding frenzy, but a moral, ethical and financial rupture among all American citizens. According to ABC News, today, half of all Americans are living in polarized communities. Essentially, like minded people have migrated closer to like minded people breeding intolerance.
This dissension is being energized at an alarming rate by the internet, main stream media and talk radio-by the left and the right. Evidence of such dissension litters the networks as well as networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. These virtual communities of like-minded partisans’ breeds political poison which even further stimulates disunion. South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham told ABC News:
“The best evidence I think of how polarized America has become is that it makes news when Democrats and Republicans do something of substance together and that truly is a shame. We’ve gone from the Senate being presumed to be above party politics to where the news is we rejected party politics.”
While leading Democrats hoped that once elected, Obama would ‘unify’ the country, we see little along those lines. In fact, arguably, the country has never been in such turmoil. It isn’t simply a question of political affiliation, gender, race or religion: it goes much deeper than that. Some experts even suggest civil war, such as Professor Igor Panarin (Diplomatic Academy of Foreign Affairs Ministry.) Panarin theorizes this inevitable civil war with economic collapse leading to the country divided into 6 geographical parts.
Rather than solutions, we continue to see the blame game and ‘Politics’ as usual. There really is no ‘one’ party, one administration nor one network to blame for this dissension; although the Obama Administration has waged ‘war’ on Fox News, even going to far as to attempt boycotting Fox News from major press events. Even the New York Times, Columnist Thomas Friedman, warily suggests “criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.”
Many wait for 2010 elections to even the playing field while others simply bury their heads in the sand and declare all government crooked and evil. As the bickering continues on BOTH sides of the political aisle, conceivably at an individual level we can begin to restore a nation in turmoil. Perhaps we can begin to appreciate our differences and utilize that diversity to determine what is best for all as a nation.
Instead of seeing one another as ‘blue or red’ or leaving our fate up to politicians with agendas, we must remember that our country is/was and hopefully will prevail as a place for optimism and achievement if that is what one desires. As we are now forced to swallow ‘hope and change’ perhaps we can remember that our country really is a place where you can be whatever you want to be if you work hard enough, aggressive about guaranteeing individual personal freedoms, innovative yet caring, focused while fierce under fire, willing to change but without compromising the spirit of our Constitution.
Let’s keep it real. It’s time to take our country back!
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/16152
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