The Blues and Red Blues

Does anyone out there share my distress over the media’s continuing use of those maps of red and blue states? While the red/blue map thought up by some television news person a few years back was intended only as a visual lesson to explain quickly and simply how an election was shaping up, the graphic has begun to assume a rather frightening life of its own.

Coloring states either red or blue is supposed to tell us how a majority of votes were cast in those states, but these days more and more media pundits seem to refer to “red states” or “blue states” (equating red to conservative and blue to liberal) as if every living soul within those borders were in agreement.

The attitude amounts to a kind of Balkanizing of America. The different colors on the red/blue map remind one of Europe, where crossing from one country into another means that the natives owe allegiance to a different government, often speak a different language, and maintain separate legal systems.

Why do we, who have managed to live with our internal differences for two hundred-plus years, and who ought to have learned a hard lesson from our very uncivil Civil War, accept so quietly someone’s idea of dividing us into red and blue? If the Europeans have decided, after centuries of border wars, to reconcile their differences and create a Common Market, doesn’t it seem self-defeating for America now to be voluntarily dividing itself into an us-versus-us mentality?

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