Day 4: Heavy thoughts on the state of the the world

Today's prompt was "What is your favorite fairytale and why" which is something that anyone who knows me knows I should be pumped about. I'll probably do that one later on, because I do love fairytales.

But today I'm not feeling fairytales. Today I am thinking a lot about the world we live in. Last night I decided I want to try to take a break from Facebook for a while. I realized that for the last couple of weeks the time that I have spent scrolling through the feed and interacting with people has left me feeling unhappy. I feel anxious and depressed and hopeless.

This is not news to anyone. If we thought things were contentious before November, it only got worse after. To be fair to everyone, I am pretty sure it would have been that way no matter who won (except maybe Bernie Sanders). I will say that the despair would probably have been less dramatic (if no less impassioned) had Hillary won, if only because not a lot of things would have changed. Many people said that Hillary's presidency would be Obama's third term. I give Hillary a little more credit than that, but I do think that transitioning from one democratic president to the next would entail very little grand change. Conservatives could go on hating the government and all presidential policy, and liberals could continue complaining that things weren't changing fast enough.

Trump's victory, however, and the additional election of a Republican congress is a bit different. I'm not talking about Trump as the antiChrist rebirth of Hitler. I just mean that we are completely changing track, if not turning around and heading back where we came from. Trump campaigned on the promise of change, and that is what we will get. And that kind of huge dramatic change causes ripples. Republicans were looking at essentially a continuation of the status quo if Hillary won. Democrats are looking at not just moving ahead in a new direction, but the destruction of everything that they have fought bitterly for over the last several decades. And while that probably sounds like music to the ears of Republicans, I think that they should not be so surprised and disgusted that people are taking it hard.

But that brings me to the meat of the issue. And that is the bitter hatred each party seems to have for the other. There is no level of understanding. Republicans are in full victory mode. They won, so now they get to do what they want, no matter how petty it might be. And they're going to tear down every single thing that Barack Obama ever so much as looked at and smiled. Regardless whether it actually worked, or helped people, or wasn't overtly "Democratic". And Democrats? They are either despairing that the world is ending and we're all going to die in a nuclear winter, or gearing up for an all out war made of the last 8 years of Republican tactics we all couldn't stand just a few months ago.

Society is divided into an Us and a Them. The lines might vary depending on who you are and what you believe in, but what doesn't change is that there is a winner and more importantly, there is a very clear loser. In fact, for it to really count as a victory, your enemy must lose, and hopefully suffer in their losing. Because the word compromise has become synonymous with failure

I think the most depressing part of this is that it is aggressively encompassing. I grew up Republican, with liberal leanings given me by my mother (who I don't think ever realized how brave she was being a Mormon Democrat before there were facebook groups to support her). I migrated into unaffiliated territory as I grew up. I didn't identify as liberal till the last couple of years. And even then I was a conservative liberal. But all of a sudden I find myself digging in to debates on Planned Parenthood and the ACA. I find myself writing impassioned micro essays in facebook threads. But most of all, I come out of those encounters filled with disgust and anger, and absolutely no more understanding of anyone else's opinions but mine than I started with. I was literally raised in the ideology that I am now arguing against, I still have plenty of friends and family who believe it, and  yet I cannot fathom most of their opinions.

I saw a post yesterday calling out Obama for the hypocrisy of his farewell speech, talking about liberty when he had personally enacted "the biggest threat to freedom this nation has ever seen" (also known as the ACA). I said something about how putting the ACA on par with Japanese internment camps and slavery is a bit melodramatic. In his response he said "why do you like the ACA? You're the first person I've spoken to who has." I'm just stuck on that. The internet brings the world to our fingertips and yet we manage to pare it down and edit it to the point that the only way someone can hear something they disagree with is because you somehow became facebook friends with your wife's one liberal cousin and now it would be awkward to unfriend her because you see each other occasionally at funerals. I don't mean to call out this guy specifically. It is true of everyone, including myself.

But later on, on that same status someone else commented in response to me that the ACA IS slavery. Any time the government forces people to buy something they don't want it is slavery. The level of social insulation required to make that statement nearly made my brain explode. But to that guy, and more significantly, to everyone else on that thread who didn't say "I'm sorry, are you insane?", his statement made sense. It was true. I don't know how you navigate a world with divisions that fundamental.

And that's the problem. I fancy myself an understanding person. I like to think that I can listen to people and understand them. But I feel like I'm losing that. I feel like the world is losing that. I feel like communication is dying, and all that is left is propaganda and the need to be right and prove other people wrong. If I can't stop it happening to myself, what hope is there of stopping it happening to the world?