Can't We All Just Get Along? No? Well, Okay Then

Image via The Progressive

I’ll be the first to admit: I live in a bubble. It’s nice here in my bubble, shiny, clean. When the light catches the sides just right rainbows appear, iridescent swaths of color and nuance. John Travolta lives in my bubble as a boy sheathed in plastic (before there was ever a hair plug). Hybrids fight for parking spots at Whole Foods and the birds get drunk on organic berries come Fall. I live in Marin County, a bastion of liberalism coupled with wealth, a tra la la where the Trufulla Trees still grow and we have all the Thneeds we need. In Marin we are each of us both preacher and choir.

Yesterday on my way to the mall I saw a car with a McCain/Palin bumper sticker and it pricked me like a pin here in my bubble. Poke! Huh? It looked funny, a joke. For a second I forgot to breathe, the oxygen wicked away and then I remembered. Yes, yes, of course. This is an election. Two parties with a hint of a third. And a million different points of view outside this bubble where the light is refracted and split into polarizing optical opposites and nobody can really see anything.

I watched the debate last night and was bored. There is very little anyone could say at this point that would change my vote. At any point, really. I was born in this bubble and will likely never leave. I believe gay people have the right to marry. Women have the right to choose. This country needs a fundamental change in foreign policy and I see that change, that hope, in Obama. Yes we can and yes I will. November 4th. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, commited citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. –Margaret Mead

image via 30reasons.org

But I wonder. Why doesn’t everyone see it this way? What does the air taste like outside my bubble? Are the colors the same? The rainbow? Do they arc and play, is it pretty? Way back when in 1704 Sir Isaac Newton concluded that different colors are present in all light, that prisms do not create colors but merely separates what is already there.
For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color.

This election has stirred up quite a sensation. There are Democrats and there are Republicans. There is Me and then there is You. The prism has shifted and split us all, casting out the light into refractions and diffractions, slivers of different dispersions, absolute truths that must have always been there right outside my reality. I am right. My bubble is clean. I KNOW this, I will not bend. But to hear anything the sound waves must move, the light waves must bend. To know anything I must listen. And so I wonder: what is to become of the mirage that is a rainbow? There is no end. What is to become of us all if we cannot breathe outside of our own pretty little bubbles?