Dear Reader,

Unless you are a reader from the future (in which case I am dying of envy, practically, because of all the things you will know that I don't, though also, it encourages me to think there are readers in the future, implying as it does both a future *and* a future of literacy!), you are aware that these are strange, strange days in the United States.    If ever there was a time when humans were collectively looking through a glass darkly, now, among my compatriots, it is that time.

It's impossible to get a clear, firm sense of what is going on, because our common narrative has splintered so badly- it's not even a matter of he-said, she-said on national level, it's a matter of completely varying theories about the actual nature of reality.   I mean, there are people who believe our president is a Satanic Muslim Foriegn Born Anti-Christ, and there are people who think those things cannot logically cohere together in one person (and who see Satanism and the concept of the Anti-Christ as myths akin to the Easter Bunny in ridiculousness, but vastly more distasteful in aesthetic). 

Beyond people coming from different places, there is a pervasive, underlying distrust of the media (which is almost always defined as "a news outlet saying things I don't like to hear!"), an underlying distrust of the government (ours and everyone else's), an underlying distrust of the various multi-national corporations (which no longer even seem to be run by humans, but something vastly more powerful and less sympathetic), of schools, of unions, of religions- basically, there is no safe place, no sanctuary where one can go, even for a minute, and not feel surrounded and nipped at on all sides by unease, distrust.

In such an environment, it's increasingly difficult to find common ground.   Tea Partiers look insane to non-tea partiers, who are themselves viewed as elitist and/or mind controlled liberal idiots.   Liberals look like traitors to Conservatives.    Rural people look like hickish buffoons to the urbanites from the Coastal Cities.  Incredibly, at a time when we are able to travel more than we ever have, and to communicate instantly with the widest range of people possible in humanity, we seem to be backing off, shirking back into our enclaves, and limiting our meartfelt communication with people who are like us, who will hear what we hear, see what we see.  

I'm not innocent of this.    You'll note, dear reader, either of the now who has opinions on this already, or reader of the future who knows how this will all shake out and is judging me accordingly, that I'm pretty much disdainful of the tea party movement and ideas, which seem to me stunningly ignorant of both history and the human need for interdependance.  Sarah Palin does, in fact, God forgive me, make me want to claw out my eyeballs everytime I hear or read her.  Ayn Rand is someone I am fascinated with, and read out of a guilty pleasure, but when I find someone who takes her ideas seriously I feel  hysterical laughter rising in me that I have to surpress- the experience is akin to how I imagine it would be if I woke up and everyone all the sudden had elephant noses coming out of their foreheads, and didn't see it as a problem.  Utter absurdity.   Utter, sanity challenging absurdity.

So I'm not innocent in this, and I don't really know how to be innocent in this.  You live in the world.  You come to an understanding of things.   You chose sides.  I get that.  I get that to perpetually dilly dally in the maybes and well, on the other hands of existence is to stay, perpetually, in one place.   I don't want that for myself, and beyond that, my brain doesn't really let me go that way.

But I am scared- terrified, actually, does not do the experience justice- and heartbroken at the way this polarization becomes personal.  I don't think that people who attend tea party rallies are lunatics, and I don't want to start seeing them that way.  I don't think that wealthy people who vote for tax breaks for themselves at the expense of social programs for the many are evil monsters who eat their babies, and I don't want to start thinking that way.    Likewise, I don't think that Christians who vote for anti-gay legislature are hateful trolls, and etc.    I don't want to let my frustration over the outcomes of tea party rallies, tax breaks, homophobic legislature, etc, to spill into dismissing the people who pushed for those outcomes as less than me somehow.

What is universal, it seems, in this country, at this time, is the idea that our social fabric is unraveling.  Our sense of the future is coming apart at the seams.  In this, we share a commonality.    It does not feel like a good thing to share.

A blog post isn't going to solve this, obviously, but one of the reasons I'm writing is to try to get a sense of how to come together, how we as a community can come together, how I as an invidivual can make bridges.     I can't imagine his is a winner takes all game- I see it the opposite:  there is no winning unless we are all involved.   And I can't imagine how we can all get involved without there being some willingness to bend, to be empathetic.    And, ok, honestly, I feel pretty dwarfed as an individual, and have no idea how to go from here (pretty distrustful and angry) to there (?).  

But the work is clearly crucial and urgent.  

S