UM, WHERE AM I?

Everyone I know woke up the morning after the election, looked at the 2020 election results so far, and said aloud and posted on their social media feed, "Where the eff am I? What happened to my country?"

Yes, everyone I know is a coastal elite (whether or not they live on a coast). We were certain - CERTAIN - that after four years of abuse, most Americans would repudiate Donald Trump and everything he stands for. But no. 

As of this moment (November 5, 2020; 08:16 AM (Pacific time), 68,538,176 Americans have voted for Donald J. Trump. Joe Biden has 71,414,442 and is (hopefully) closing in on the magic 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency (he has 253 compared to Donald's 214). 

That's right, sixty-eight million five hundred thirty eight thousand one hundred and seventy six Americans think Donald Trump deserves another four years in the office of President. This is astounding! 

Joe is saying the right things about healing, about being President of all Americans, about finding common ground, about going back to what America stands for while moving forward. But everything seems different now, and the United States of the future will never be something it was before. Various terms are are floating around in our heads: culture wars, civil war, unbridgeable divide. We are all mostly in bubbles of likeness, perpetuated by social media (anti-social media is what I call it) and the mostly partisan news sources we watch and read. 

Do people in Redlandia and those on Bluelandia have values that are so dissimilar that we will never come together? Will we always be divided by narratives - often false - that become fortified mantras? I'm a devoted cynic. No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up (thanks Lily Tomlin). But there is hope, and it will require great effort. The hope is founded on changing our behaviors, something we have the innate capacity to do, but usually the mind set to resist. In a recent post I talked about where we humans are in the process of evolution, and I wondered if intelligence is the end point of natural evolution, and the beginning of conscious evolution. We can change our behaviors if we want to. 

And by the way, my map, above, is obviously a great over-simplification. There are many blue folks in red territory, and red in blue. The urban-rural divide is real and a major factor. We have serious issues to deal with, and the best thing we can do is get started.

Now...how will we connect the disparate parts of Bluelandia? High-speed rail? Solar-powered airplanes? Hmmm.....

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