The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You tell me how a political party that welcomes immigrants, LGBT’s, Moslems, minorities, the disabled, the poor, the blue collar folks, how a Big Tent party like that can lose to folks whose main appeal is racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and religious intolerance, a party of the corporations and the country club rich.  How the party of Wall Street can manage to stay a viable political force by trotting out wedge issues like abortion or church and state separation or the right to own assault weapons?  C’mon, something stinks in Denmark here and it isn’t the caviar.

I know, I know, it’s called the United STATES, emphasis not on the united but on the states.  The Founding Fathers, those demi-gods of yore, the ones who owned slaves and huge tracts of land, they managed to unite the squabbling states by compromising to give little Rhode Island the same power as New York.  Fair?  Democratic?  Not really, but who said America was fair?  Women couldn’t vote in the United Colonies elections.  And don’t even mention the slaves.  In fact, don’t even teach that stuff anymore.  The Wise Men, the ones who wrote the inviolable Constitution, give Wyoming with its meager population, the same number of Senators as California.  Don’t talk to me about fair.

So now we have a country divided.  Red states mostly rural, mostly western or southern, poor, religious, aggrieved.  And blue states, coastal, wealthy, educated, urban, aggrieved.  Not to generalize too much.  You could almost divide the country by urban vs rural.  Washington, Oregon and California, cross the Cascades or the Sierras you got rural red.  Coastal side, blue urban.  The suburbs, call them purple.  The South, the Confederates, almost all red.  The Yankee states, all blue.  The vast territory in between, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, Montana, Utah, call it the Big Empty, huge expanses, not too many people, red red red.

And we have a Congress that rarely compromises.  Democrats vote in a block, Republicans vote in a block.  How the devil do we solve problems if nobody meets the other halfway?  It’s all or nothing, do or die, any bill that needs passing requires 60% and with Congress equally divided, 60% might as well be the moon.  No wonder polls show most of us think the country is on a handbasket ride to hell.

With social media driving the wedges deeper and deeper, how do we find common ground anymore?  How do we hear the other side, their concerns, their fears, maybe even their hopes and dreams?  Maybe the chasm is too wide now, the animosities too deep.  If we’re not united, why not accept it?  Maybe we should rethink the Civil War.  Let the South go.  Re-establish the Confederacy.  Let the states decide which country they’ll join.  It may be time to consider the unimaginable.

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