American Bridge

American Bridge is falling down. The rungs are shoddy and rotting and its tenuous hold to the bank is being broken away fiber by fiber with each negative shot fired from one side to the other. Once it falls, all that will be left is a deep crevice of resentment creating an insurmountable separation that will make compromise impossible.

Every four years, our nation's only large-scale political discussion becomes a sad display of gotchas, one-liners, told ya so's, smearing and scare tactics. We choose a side early on and then turn a closed mind to nothing but what we want to see and hear as we tear the opponent down as loudly as we can. From yard signs and bumper stickers to Facebook posts and emails, negativity rules as everyone becomes an expert and opinion becomes indisputable fact. We all become spin doctors twisting and mutilating words and statistics into whatever we please. Context? What's that?

Both sides know what's best for our country and that the other side is full of disconnected morons with nothing but their own selfish interests in mind. We label each other and create an image of the other side. We paint each other as villains. "Republican" and "Democrat" take on a life of their own as examples of everything that is wrong with our country, so much so that the words themselves conjure up a predetermined idea of a person's entire personality. We are no longer citizens of these United States. We are red or blue. We are callous or lazy. We are simply right or simply wrong.

We need this middle ground we're destroying. But instead, the side that wins will see no wrong and the side that loses will see no right. There will be resentment among the losing side and they will spend the next four years reveling in, if not hoping for, the failures of the "winner". They will actually be happy when something goes wrong and our country is worse for it. They will have "I told you so" at the tip of their tongues, ready at all times to feel the sweet satisfaction of their utterance.

If we want to save our precious middle ground, we must make a decision to get more satisfaction in finding compromise than in finding fault. The cheap jabs and mockery must be put aside and we must at least attempt to work together before the bridge falls once and for all, leaving us staring from opposite banks as what's best for our country is crumbling into the vast ridge we have created between us.