What a Purple-Full World... and Nation, Too!

It seems as if every state is a purple state.

Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman of the University of Michigan have constructed excellent cartographic maps of the 2004 United States election based upon population studies:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/

It is to the advantage of the far-right media to portray this nation as utterly divided. Yet this is not 1860, and we have more in common with each other than we think.

Down South in college, thanks to those "right wing-nuts" and "redneck evangelicals", I never lacked even living 1000 miles from home. While in theory, I might have been next door to a perfect heathen thanks to some of my beliefs, those beliefs didn't stop them from stuffing me, making sure I had rides everywhere I needed to go, pressing money into my hand when I was at my most starvingstudent, etc.

Then in graduate school, my haunts and hanging buddies moved from the right to the left. They were as kind to me as the Christians in college were... giving me a boost repeatedly every cold morning all winter, letting me have my morning coffee when I was short on change, giving me a ear to talk to and a shoulder to cry on.

Don't get me wrong. Vast disparities in income, social justice, and philosophy still exist.

Yet we are still "one nation under a groove".

And that groove is freedom.

We've hit a rough spot. By emphasizing our similarities instead of our differences--successful strategies used by the winning candidates the Democrats fielded--we will be all the better as a nation.

And I think to myself, what a purple-full world...