Yellow Dog Republicans

(updated below)

I drive through my neighborhood and am yet again amazed by all the McCain/Palin yard signs. What campaign have they been following? What are they thinking? It would be easier to just assume they were ignorant or crazy. But this is the South and there are so many of them.  And I know some of them - which makes it harder to demonize them. What are they thinking?

Maybe it's me that's out of step?  Maybe I shouldn't be deconstructing what the Republicans are saying.  Maybe if I'd grown up here and come from a long line of good conservatives, I wouldn't have to think.  Or, at least, I wouldn't have to think about the rhetoric.  I'd know who I was.

But, we live in a technological age of instant communication and widely cast virtual communities. I don't have to either integrate myself into the local dominant social order or be an outcast.  At the same time, there's still this tendency to want to see the world in terms of us and them.

"In spite of limitless opportunities for enriching understanding, adding potentials, and cocreating new worlds through the expanding arena of relationship, many people seem to vastly prefer using these technologies to cement their relationships with those who already share their ways of life. Certainly one can appreciate the sense of security and support to which such tendencies contribute, But the result has increasingly become a dangerous distancing. When congregating with others who already share one's realities and values, strong tendencies are unleashed for such groups to seal themselves off from the rest of the world, to develop a sense of a superior good, and to brand those outside the network as a problem if not downright evil. The technologies of saturation thus lend themselves to islands of self-righteousness in a sea of antagonism." - Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self

I'm tired. I'm ready for this election to be over.  I'm ready to move forward, get past being in a red state or a blue state, and get on with being part of the United States of America! Wouldn't that be nice? If only...

By the way, somebody stole my Obama/Biden yard sign again last night!

UPDATE: Gergen's The Saturated Self has a link to the Public Conversations Project website.  The site provides information and tools for facilitating dialog between groups or individuals separated by 'essentially contested concepts', including downloadable publications such as Fostering Dialog Across Divides and Reaching our across the Red/Blue Divide, One Person at a Time.