NEBENAN
On Thursday I had potato pancakes with applesauce for lunch with with Heinrich and Elke and for supper Schnittbrot, bread cut up with cheese of several kinds and wurst of several kinds on top, for Heinrich and Elke the normal evening meal. Tom and family called in the mid afternoon as they were preparing the Thanksgiving dinner and again at 10:45 p.m. German time as they were eating dessert with neighbors after the Thanksgiving dinner.
The high point of the day, for me, was joining a large group of people gathered outside Nebenan (Nearby) the cafe of the church community where we drank gluhwein, wine with spices, and ate Schmaltz, flavored lard on bread.
It was in the low 40’s and damp chilly. There were several wood fires in metal barrels with designs cut into them to warm us a little. It was fun.
It was a pretty quiet day, except for what was still buzzing in my head. Again, you continue at your own peril of being depressed or bored and are free to leave right now.
ON AND ON AND ON AND ON
Yesterday I wondered about tribal partisanship and today I’ll mention the things that seem to me to be enflaming partisanship.
Change
The first is that because of the computer and the Internet, change in technology is every year more rapid and intense. Our ways of doing almost anything are becoming dislocated which is disconcerting for many of us and also has big economic repercussions because it is upending our identity as workers of one kind or another. Jobs are vanishing, or shifting to other parts of the world, and being replaced by skills I don’t have. Suddenly the playing field has flattened and people anywhere in the world can compete. Technological transformation can pop up in any place in the world and rapid transportation and distribution has shrunk the world so that production can come instantly from anywhere in the world. So we are having to deal with much more rapid change in every aspect of our lives. How can we hold on to our our identities, our values and ways of doing things when everything we know is being dislocated? Rapid change heightens the tension between the old who want to go back and the young who want to move forward, rural areas that want to hold on to threatened traditional values and urban areas which are centers of rapid change, rich countries which have protected themselves and exploited the rest of the world and energetic, well educated poorer countries who are determined to have a slice of the pie. And with such rapid change there comes the feeling that as individuals we are helpless to stem the threats that change brings and clueless about the future we are shifting into. We are rudderless and compassless and really want someone to blame whether it is FaceBook or Google or the Chinese or immigrants or the elites or the Democrats or the Republicans. We don’t know what to do, but we are getting mad as hell and that doesn’t bode well.
Internet
One aspect of rapid change that affects both sides, conservatives and liberals, is that instead of dealing with the people around us with varying views that we have to deal with, we can now connect with and be supported by others who believe in the same values we have through cable tv and the internet. We can easily join the tribes that we feel comfortable with, the tribes that we feel are going to defend us, instead of being isolated helpless individuals we can now ignore our neighbors who keep us in check and become a tribe with real power. There weren’t just a few individuals in front of the Kammer Lichtspiele protesting vaccinations, but those people were part of an army spread all across Europe fighting the perceived conspiracy of liberal groups who are trying to coerce them into doing something immoral. They are the army of the righteous connected together by the Internet and cable tv. The women’s marches in America were instantly summoned through the internet and were a force to be reckoned with, another army. Every morning I hear from the Liberal army that is trying to enflame me into fighting back against the right with email after email, many titled “Fight the Right”. I assume, since I don’t watch FOX News or show interest in MAGA politicians who would connect with me if I did, that a similar flood of emails are egging the antivaxxers on. So the email and cable news and podcasts, new methods of Internet communication, are making this partisan divide much more intense. In a sense we are all brainwashed, liberals, conservatives, religious people, secularists all banded into armies defending ourselves against each other. At least that is the way that it seems to me. It is enflamed emotions, not reason, that is whipping us along and making it impossible to talk to each other.
But yet, it is fine for me to feel that I have a sense of what is going on, which is what I have been trying to do. But unfortunately, even if what I have come up with makes sense, at least to me, and helps me a little bit, this is probably the easy part. It is easier to describe my feelings about what is enflaming us and causing intense partisanship than it is to find a way out of this brewing civil war. So I’ll put that off till tomorrow and see if I can come with something by then.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 