Living In USA

Americans are more segregated than ever. We are segregated by race and ethnicity, by class, and increasingly, by politics. We are diverse as a country, but we live in neighborhoods with people who are more and more like us. As journalist David Brooks observed, "Block by block, and institution by institution, we are remarkably homogenous."

Because we are such a geographically mobile country, we have frequent opportunities to make choices about where we will live. Progressives and liberals are drawn to Boston and San Francisco, while conservatives might be more likely to choose Texas. The realignments seem to be moving us into more and more politically homogeneous states as well.

Dualism is the idea that there are only two ways to look at any problem, situation, or the world. American culture is, by its very nature, rather dualistic. We tend to see things as either black or white. Either we are friends or we are not. Either something is right or it is wrong. A person is either good or evil. This position does not allow us to accept shades of gray or a middle ground when approaching complex situations.

Pernicious dualism, a term often used by Columbia University Teachers' College professor L. Lee Knefelkamp, refers to the tendency of some people to exploit dualism to their advantage (the word pernicious means "done with evil intent."). [2] Either you support the war or you are unpatriotic. You are either with us, or you are "with the terrorists." Those who oppose the U.S. occupation of Iraq "hate freedom." And pernicious dualists are not always political conservatives; liberals can be just as limiting in their framing of problems. Either you support Affirmative Action or you are a racist. Either you support abortion rights or you are a woman hater. The list on both sides goes on.

However, as linguist George Lakoff has observed, the political right is far more effective in naming issues and programs in order to force a dualistic response. [3] Who could be against a "healthy forest initiative" or against laws with names like the "patriot" act or the "defense of marriage" act? Obviously, only a person who is an anti-marriage, tree-hating traitor could oppose these, never mind that these issues were, respectively, about increasing logging on public land, curbing civil liberties, and denying millions of committed same-sex couples the right to marry. Again, the point here is not that these programs were themselves without any merits, only that in naming them the way they did, their proponents were able to cut short vital debate about their strengths and weaknesses.

If Americans cannot become more comfortable with nuance, complexity, and relativism, we become more likely to fall into the pernicious dualist's trap. We lose the ability to think clearly and creatively about complex problems and will tend to increasingly rely on those with the most extreme positions to define our issues and limit our solutions. This polarization in our thinking, further promoted by our two-party monopoly on national politics, is making us as a country more divided.

United States is a land of religious pluralism. Protestants, Catholic, and other Christian groups have by and large laid the foundation for a society that includes Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Hindus, Wiccans, and countless other faiths.

Religious fundamentalists (those who believe that their version of their faith has a monopoly on virtue) are increasing both in their numbers and in their influence. Just as Islamic fundamentalists, a tiny fringe of the world's billion-plus Muslims, are increasing in their numbers and influence around the world, Christian fundamentalists are threatening to end the equality of faiths in this country. People of faith, quite understandably, view their religion as the best possible path. But when they begin to view it as the only possible path, taking it to the extreme of using their political, military, or physical power to punish those who believe differently, it threatens everyone.