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Snowflakes, MAGA, IPAs and Avocado Toast
Our culture seems hell-bent on framing every important issue into mutually exclusive binary debates. It seems like there always has to be a right and wrong, black and white, winners and losers. This sense has been ramping up for a while now, but it sure feels like we’ve reached terminal velocity lately, starting somewhere around the 2000 election and culminating in the ever-dramatic Age of TrumPelosi. Whether it’s a over-moralized topic like abortion or gay rights, a political discussion like economics or immigration, or a universally important issue like climate change or health care, we tend to divide ourselves into two camps.
Of course, there’s always the splinter camps on both the left and right — the libertarian version of conservative thought, and the socialistic strain of liberal thought — but always there is a clear expectation that at the end of the day all the stray Merry Men will line up behind their respective “conservative” or “liberal” banners and take their marching orders. This happens in the political sphere as much as in the religious one, both of which I study and engage with great curiosity and intrigue.
I’m only 30, but I remember a day when it wasn’t so polarized, when Bill O’Reilly’s show was not a George W. Bush stump stand, when Sean Hannity had Alan Colmes, when Senator John McCain called Senator Barack Obama “a decent…
