The country is “Slipping Into Darkness”……song made famous War….(the group not the conflict)……

For a couple of decades now the US has been separating itself into tribes…..and it has only gotten worse and the last election illustrates just how far this division has gone.

Of course you know I have written on the subject before, right?

https://lobotero.com/2018/05/11/tribes/

Our beloved nation is slipping further and further into ‘tribalism’…..which, in my opinion, will destroy this country and all we have made of it in the last 200+ years.

For about five decades the politics of fear have us dividing ourselves into tribes….basically it is ‘us against them’……these tribes that will destroy all we have accomplished.

People have always used fear for intimidation of the subordinates or enemies, and shepherding the tribe by the leaders. Recently, it appears that Pres. Trump has used fear by suggesting in a tweet that four minority congresswomen go back to the places they came from.

There is a longstanding history of employing the fear of “the others,” turning humans into illogical ruthless weapons, in service to an ideology. Fear is a very strong tool that can blur humans’ logic and change their behavior.

Fear is arguably as old as life. It is deeply ingrained in the living organisms that have survived extinction through billions of years of evolution. Its roots are deep in our core psychological and biological being, and it is one of our most intimate feelings. Danger and war are as old as human history, and so are politics and religion.

https://theconversation.com/the-politics-of-fear-how-it-manipulates-us-to-tribalism-113815

How you may ask?

All this division and tribalism is threatening the pillar of our nation…the Constitution.

“Americans have come to view the Constitution not as a statement of shared principles but as a cudgel with which to attack their enemies”  Gordon Wood…….Not a more accurate observation has been found.

The U.S. Constitution was and is imperfect. It took a civil war to establish that the principles enumerated in its Bill of Rights extended to all Americans, and the struggle to live up to those principles continues today. But focusing on the Constitution’s flaws can overshadow what it did achieve. Its revolutionary ambition was to forge, out of a diverse population, a new national identity, uniting Americans under a banner of ideas. To a remarkable extent, it succeeded.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/the-threat-of-tribalism/568342/

Maybe we should forget about Greenland and do some work on the good old US of A…..(link has an interactive map for your ease of comprehension)….

… a new way to map the diverse lands that make up the United States. Unlike a traditional classroom map, this uses counties rather than states as the building blocks for its regions. The United Regions of America map solves the problem that many states actually lie in more than one distinct region (for example: Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Colorado, California, or New York, to name a few). And since there are 3,142 counties (including areas equivalent to counties), the regional boundaries can be drawn much more precisely than with just 50 states.

https://jeremyposadas.org/regions/

If you did not like that map…then maybe this one will be more to your liking…..https://considerable.com/us-map-38-states/

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

Your Country Needs You!

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”