"Them v Us" - thought it read "We the People"...
Never have I been this unsettled by an election, especially if the old adage holds that we get the government we deserve. That speaks to the extent we participate in the process of getting informed about issues, candidate positions and actually voting.
Elections have always been about people voting their wallet, but now it seems we're voting our paranoia. Insert terror here: getting informed seems to consist of sharing memes that are in knee-jerk agreement of the most superficial of policy treatments and skimming through media outlets that share our bias. This takeaway results in passionate candidate preference and an inability to credibly defend the choice.
Maybe technology has outstripped the human nervous systems' ability to process, but there is way more heat than light surrounding this election because of it. Every issue has more than two sides and some are more finely nuanced than others; just the nature of issues and the sheer number of them are overwhelming. This is nothing new to the human condition and no one person can take them all on, not even philosophically.
But pour all these big, hairy issues into a funnel and only one thing possibly gets distilled that we can influence: resolve. And resolve, from the ground up, demands that we determine who we are - as a person, a nation and as a citizen of the world. It's a non-starter, though, if we begin with a mindset polarized by "them v us". Instead, "we are they" reframes the conversation and removes the anger. By definition it's inclusive of differing viewpoints and gives us a minute to pause and consider a response - not just react. However, a considered response presumes having the necessary information, something no amount of memes or clever hashtags will provide. What's masquerading as intelligence will surely give us the government we deserve.
