I live in a Blue Family, so what do I know? Over hear in Blueville, there are certain things you don’t do in polite company. For example, you don’t break out in song with your rendition of “Barack the Magic Negro Lives in DC.” You don’t pose open-ended questions about the validity of the president’s birth certificate. You don’t use every cold day as an excuse to remind people that Al Gore is fat. If you don’t know what socialism is, you avoid the topic and remain silent when it comes up. You don’t expect your children to remain abstinent until they’re married, and you don’t expect them to be married until their late 20’s. You don’t expect your spouse to adhere to traditional gender roles or openly judge others who work or don’t work or stay at home with their children or don’t stay at home with their children. You expect people to use contraception if they don’t want to have a child. You don’t call people ‘faggots.’ You don’t care if gay people get married. You don’t look at people funny if they don’t regularly attend religious services. You don’t tell your children that they’re going to hell. ‘Ragheads’ is not a word you hear except when you’re at the gym and they have Fox News on the teevee. Most of the time when someone says ‘Jesus Christ’ they are expressing a certain degree of exasperation. You don’t come up to total strangers and offer to lay your hands on them and help them accept their lord and savior into their lives. ‘Old Europe’ is a place you’d like to visit, not a totem of derision. Science is something smart people do, not a conspiracy to make your child lose religion. You learn evolution so you can understand biology and plate tectonics so you can understand geology and the Bible so you can understand literature, and none of these things interfere with each other. You don’t question the manhood of anyone who eats foreign foods. You don’t repeat anything Sarah Palin says expecting people to agree with it. Nipples don’t freak you out. You haven’t met anyone who believes the Teletubbies are homosexuals. And you don’t think brown people are destroying the fabric and traditions of society.
We increasingly live in two different, largely incompatible worlds. It’s not all North vs. South. But it’s definitely Blue vs. Red. And all of it is dividing people along the wrong lines. It should be those who have vs. those who don’t. Instead, it’s those who are tolerant vs. those who are not. Or, those who believe in science vs. those who see science as a threat. We gotta get outta this place.
