Further thoughts on a divisive issue

David Horsey avoided the two obvious approaches to Fourth of July cartoons: Those simply waving the flag and cheering, and those pointing out the various hypocrisies of celebrating at all.

It's almost as if he walks around actually talking to people instead of sitting in his cubbyhole absorbing and illustrating political rhetoric.

The two little kids in the foreground are a hope of sorts. I live next to an affordable apartment complex that has somehow acquired an enormous contingent of under-12s -- there are only six units but at least 16 little kids and one of the apartments has no kids at all.

It's a racially diverse group but the kids are all so young that, as they run around playing, the parents are mostly just talking parent-talk and not politics and I suspect that's a very good thing, because the parents are diverse in that other way, the way Horsey draws them.

Having grown up in a blue-collar community, I lost a few Facebook friends during the last elections just as I lost a few in person during Vietnam but, in both cases, the ones who walked away were hardly the closest in the first place.

Before we had talk radio and divisive politicians and limitless cable channels pouring political crap into our ears night and day, O Best Beloved, we differed on specific topics, but we didn't identify ourselves half as strongly by political divisions, and the liberal/conservative balances of political parties tended to shift back and forth over time.

Meanwhile, there were Good People and Assholes, and politics was only a very small part of how you identified them. In fact, over in Blue Collar Land, "He's good people" means that you should ignore his politics and the other stupid shit he says, because he's, well, good people.

And there was the opposite: Back then, the traditional uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner might not bring up politics at all, but, once he got a few drinks in him, would still find a way to somehow demonstrate the fact that he was, despite being your mother's much-loved little brother, an Asshole.

Anyway, the Good Old Days weren't all that good, but they sure were a lot more innocent.

"MAGA" simply yearns for a time when we didn't have to think so much about unpleasant things.

For those who missed yesterday's collection of July 4, 1954 cartoons, "the way it used to be" was that we -- the majority -- were the only faces on the limited media of the time, or at least the only ones with speaking roles.

We weren't yet aware of the CIA's underground operations and were only on the brink of things like the Montgomery bus boycott (1955) and the Feminine Mystique (1963).

History was a list of inventors and presidents and great movements with an assumption that we were progressing towards some great cosmic goal.

And, as part of that process, women had the vote and the slaves were free so that, as far as "we" could tell, everything was just rolling along as it should.

Point being that people very rarely decide to be Assholes.

The vast majority are simply divided between "aware" and "unaware," and so the struggle to create Good People has always been to push people out of their comfort zone a bit so that they will become, in the current parlance, "woke."

The innocent, isolated ignorance we had before the coming of "The Global Village" is no longer acceptable.

The question is, how do you overcome a natural tendency towards clannishness, when powerful political forces depend on exploiting it?

Jen Sorensen explores the way the hard-right both covers its racism, which nobody wants to subsidize, and exploits misconceptions about "socialism," which you can always find funding to do.

What makes this work is that she casts her antagonist in the role of an opinion-maker rather than a man-on-the-street.

This would be a pointless, divisive pissing-match if it were posed as a conversation between average people, because blame only forces people into a more hardened defensive position.

And if it were as simple as telling people the facts, we'd have freed the slaves and extended women the vote back in the 1840s when their movements first emerged.

But "Do the Right Thing" is a personal approach.

Political change is far more complex.

For instance, suffragists fought furiously to keep the word "male" out of the 14th Amendment, because it was the first time the rights of citizens were defined in the Constitution by gender.

But in 1870, the South was scared shitless over giving its newly-freed slaves the franchise at all, and cutting that new vote in half was the only way to get the Amendment ratified.

Theoretically, at least.

Suffrage and Abolition were, from the start, locked into the idea that you'd never get both at once.

That may have been true. Both movements were also divided between idealists and pragmatists.

It would be surprising if it had been otherwise.

Or if the idealists had been able to carry the day.

In this cartoon, Joel Pett explains the current partisan divide in terms that made me laugh despite my revulsion for his truth.

Nobody ever lays it out in such stark terms, and many of them don't even see it with that clarity themselves.

Passing laws takes a lot of what we learned about in eighth grade social studies: Log-rolling and back-patting.

The process is often compared to making sausage in that you shouldn't watch it being done, and there are too many people who not only don't want to see the nasty bits going into the grinder but prefer a form of log-rolling where nobody has to get wet, and back-patting without unwelcome touching.

Which is as naive and unworkable as thinking that we had no problems back in 1954 because nobody complained loudly enough to be heard.

We've come a long way, but there's still plenty of work, and opening of hearts and minds, ahead.