Yesterday I allowed myself (on FaceBook, of all places) to get sucked into a political discussion of the president’s healthcare efforts. Because this is a non-political site (honest) I’m not going to discuss the particulars, but basically I spent much of the morning in rather heated conversation, at the end of which I felt misunderstood, defeated, and angry. There’s no talking politics with someone who disagrees with you these days.

Why does this concern me? Because I believe we’ve become prey to a certain hardening of our belief systems and an unwillingness to question our own thinking. The country has polarized into “hard right” and “hard left” and there’s no middle ground. The worst part of the matter is the packaging of ideas — if you’re for the initiatives of one side or the other, you’re for ALL of their initiatives. You won’t need to think for yourself; all you need to do is follow the leadership and yell loudest.

I was first concerned about this type of rhetoric during the Bush administration, when I felt many of the president’s opponents were shrill and hysterical. I remember  one evening when my husband told a member of the extended family “Bush is not the antichrist” and the response was to argue. I believed this type of partisan hard-lining was the province of only one party.

But I was so wrong. My son came home from a friend’s house the other day and told me, “Basically, they’re pretty sure Obama is the devil.”

At that point I had to accept: it wasn’t about a particular political party, this was the rhetoric we have come to use, and the hard-lining Americans have come to believe in. No, Bush is not the antichrist, Obama is not the devil, they are human beings. In the old days the POTUS used to get a certain measure of respect along with the office. No more.

How did this happen? I’m not sure but my husband and I just finished a book on tape by Neil Postman called Amusing ourselves to Death. In this work, back in the 80′s, the author argued that the television was effecting the way we thought and perhaps most troublingly the way we saw politics, inculcating a rhetoric where instead of discussing problems we simply called names and reviled. In the twenty-five intervening years since the book came out, political rhetoric has apparently continued going in the same direction. Our nation has slipped into being the kind of place where we can’t have a civil conversation about decisions that need to be made, instead we get angry.

Why is this a problem? Because while the man on the street shouts incoherent insults, big corporations are influencing, even controlling, the decisions in this country, such as bailouts and healthcare, in their own favor. They don’t want  everyday people to be able to discuss and negotiate; they want their lobbyists to be the only people doing that.

What hope is there for this situation? Well, blogs for one thing, where we can talk more openly about problems that face us, perhaps first on a small scale (we need more and better public pools in Fort Worth, as you remember) and then growing to bigger issues. I’m hoping blogs are the antidote to the television-drenched view of reality that has polarized us into “us” and “them.” This may be an overly optimistic view, but I’ve always been an optimist.

I guess maybe FaceBook isn’t the place to talk politics. But do patronize your local blog and discus things civilly. And do consider, before you demonize the opposition, that when you do that they are going to fire right back with the same. Ultimately, I think we need negotiation, not confrontation.