By the time you read this, the votes will be in and mostly counted. I fear, however, that little will be resolved, and not because of the inevitable claims of election fraud we have already been told will be asserted. Nothing will be resolved because the issues that define the political chasms in America don’t lend themselves to resolution. Americans today live in dueling universes and experience life in competing realities. The perspectives today are divided among many fault lines; urban vs rural, education level, religion, race, income, and divergent views of personal liberty, just to name a few.
If competing realities were not hard enough to bridge, the sobering truth is that the politics of the day reward candidates who play up our differences and punish those who seek to narrow them. Perhaps that was always true to a degree, but we now have the very real prospect of violence as an accepted means of expressing political grievance added to the mix. Not since the ’60s has political violence been so front and center as part of the political landscape. While risking a charge of recency bias, it seems to me that at least in the ’60s the political leadership on both sides saw violence as an illegitimate expression of political grievance. Admittedly, I was seven when the ’60s ended so others may have a more informed first-person impression of the era. What I do know now is that it feels to me that violence is at the top of some political to-do lists and is an active part of the strategy some have in place to grab and retain power.
The implications of all of this are beyond my ability to fully comprehend, but it’s clear that part of the result is that important work is not being done. Go no further than the sobering headlines emerging from the global climate conference. Globally, we are falling far short of meeting the carbon reduction targets. That’s an obvious result of our collective inability to act on a consensus view of what is in our collective best interests. Climate inaction is just one example of many that jeopardize our ability to preserve Cape Cod.
If I had the answers to solving the problems that are fracturing this country, I would offer them up, but I am largely at a loss. That said, ignoring a problem only serves to perpetuate it, so I encourage you to think more about politics in America. It’s our only way forward.
