The Tectonic Rift Threatening to Subsume Us All

If you’re inclined to read the news, or God help you, watch it on Tik Tok, you’ve no doubt encountered the notion of the hateful partisan divide in various countries, including our own. It's this thing that everyone seems to acknowledge exists, much like the concept of weather or the notion that stepping on a LEGO brick in the middle of the night is about as close to a religious experience as you’re likely to get this side of the River Styx. It’s a term tossed around with the same nonchalance as bipartisanship or civil discourse, which in our current era are sort of like saying unicorn smegma—lovely to think about but entirely mythical.

Now, the partisan divide, for those of you fortunate enough to be living in a prepper bunker or perhaps ensconced in a Wi-Fi dead zone, refers to the ever-widening chasm between the two major political parties in the United States. Imagine a Thanksgiving dinner where the cranberry sauce is a political belief. One uncle wants to sweeten it with honey, and the other insists it should be tart with orange zest. Rather than compromise, they each bring their own cranberry sauce and proceed to throw it at each other, leaving the table (and everyone around it) looking like the set of a snuff film.

To say the divide is getting worse would be akin to noting that Boeing has had a bit of trouble with their plane doors. It's not just a schism; it's a full-on tectonic rift, with each side hunkering down in their respective echo chambers, subsisting on a steady diet of confirmation bias and vitriol. You know the kind of stuff—think of cable news or Facebook comment sections, where the word discourse is often preceded by the term dumpster fire.

The phenomenon is not just a matter of ideological difference, which one might argue is natural and even healthy in a diverse society. No, what we’re dealing with here is a tribalism that would make the Hatfields and McCoys look like an amiable game of Scrabble. It’s not merely that people disagree on issues, it’s that the very act of disagreement has become the issue. It’s as if the concept of agreeing to disagree has been lost somewhere along with our ability to write in cursive and our tolerance for gluten.

Each side views the other not merely as wrong, but as fundamentally flawed, morally bankrupt, or in some cases, subhuman. There's a whole cottage industry built around this—think talk radio hosts who, in another life, might have been carnival barkers, or political commentators who brandish opinions with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

This is not to suggest that there aren’t reasonable people on both sides. There are, and they exist in roughly the same numbers as Hobbits and honest digital marketers. The problem is that the reasonable folks tend to get drowned out by the shrill cries of the extremists, who are more than happy to leverage the rage machine for ratings, clicks, and political donations.

What this all adds up to is a situation where common ground is harder to find than Waldo in a candy cane factory. It’s a land of Us vs. Them, where every political conversation feels like a zero-sum game, and where nuance is about as welcome as a police officer at a House Music Festival.

So what’s the solution? If I knew, I’d be writing this from a Nobel Prize ceremony instead of a studio apartment in Ravenswood. But perhaps the first step is recognizing the problem for what it is—a deeply entrenched and self-perpetuating cycle of division that feeds on itself. And maybe, just maybe, we can start to mend it by remembering that at the end of the day, we’re all stuck on this rock together, hurtling through the void, trying to make sense of it all.