WE ARE DOOMED or WHAT DO PEDOPHILES AND PROSTITUTES HAVE TO DO WITH THIS ELECTION?

I dropped in on a Facebook conversation between two friends yesterday. Two people that know each other for more than fifty years. Two people that grew up in the same neighborhood, attended the same elementary, junior high and high schools. Two people that managed to stay connected with each other across more than half a century. And two people that now find themselves on opposite ends of the political divide. A divide that started as a crack, slowly worsened to a fissure and has now grown into a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon.

As you might imagine, this particular exchange was more of an argument than a casual conversation between two old friends. In fact, it was downright brutal. Each participant accusing the other of having no moral values, of supporting a candidate and a party that lies, engages in corrupt activities, wants to destroy the country and is anti-American, anti-religion and wants to tell you what to eat. Each thrust of the epee in the digital fencing match that I witnessed was met with an equally violent response. Every, “Biden is corrupt and he lies” was met with, a “what about the 230,000 who died of coronavirus?” Every, “Cuomo sent seniors back to a nursing home to die” was parred with “babies were separated from their mothers at the boarder”. It was honestly hard to watch. It was clear that neither participant was willing to give any ground in this battle. That both believed with all the heart that they were so very right and, not only was the other so very wrong, they were grievously wrong. Monumentally wrong. In one knock-out blow, one participant accused the other of supporting a candidate that wanted to legalize prostitution, endorsed pedophiles (whatever that means) and was aggressively seeking to terminate pregnancies in the ninth month. And these were two old friends.

It was clear to me, while witnessing this display of brutal partisanship, that each of these individuals lived in their own echo chamber. Each saw the world from one point of view and refused to acknowledge that another existed. That we live in a world where every fact is contested. Every statement is argued. That there is no place to comfortably go for objective, unbiased, neutral information. That the divide between us is widening.

It was also clear to me, that we are doomed.

We are doomed because we have real, serious, generational defining problems to deal with and we bicker about nonsense. We are doomed because there is a raging pandemic that has infected over Ten Million citizens of this country and continues to hit record daily highs and half the country doesn’t believe that it is real. We are doomed because we have a looming economic catastrophe that is just beginning to take hold and has already put millions out of work and our government can’t get out of its own way to help people. We are doomed because we have a country coming to grips with its sinful past and finally awakening to the systemic racism that has existed in this country for four hundred years and a good portion of this country is perfectly fine with systemic racism. We are doomed because we are faced with the ticking clock of climate change that threatens to alter life on the planet as we know it and half the country doesn’t believe in the science that supports this. But we are mostly doomed because we are an increasingly divided nation that, fueled by the hypnotic mantras of cable news and radio, continues to pull itself apart at the seams. Refuses to concede a single inch in the turf battle of politics as usual. We are doomed because while any one of these problems, taken individual, would require a monumental, bi-partisan and fulsome effort to respond to, we instead argue about absurd and misguided idiocies like prostitution and pedophilia. And late term abortions.

If two childhood friends can’t find common ground to have a respectful conversation about the real challenges that we face as a nation, can we really expect our elected officials to?

If they don’t, if we don’t, then we are truly doomed.