Why did I grow all of this corn for cornmeal? Why would I do such a thing?
It’s just for fun, of course. I just like growing corn. It’s certainly not because I expect there to be a second wave of the pandemic that will bring down the supply chains for good, and that we’ll have only the food we have on hand to get us through the winter. And even if such a thing were to happen, I have total faith in my government’s willingness and ability to feed me and my family in such an emergency. Don’t you?
It used to be that you knew if your neighbor was a liberal so-and-so or a conservative so-and-so, but it didn’t come up that much in a everyday life. You could still be neighborly, and politics mostly played out in the privacy of the voting booth. One of the few ways someone would make it known what they really thought was if they wrote a letter to the editor, but that was rarely an everyday thing.
But nowadays, people seem obsessed with sharing everything. They let it all hang out, in writing, and depending on the medium, accessible to hundreds or thousands or millions. And, since no one wants to be wrong, when the inevitable pushback arrives, people double down on their views, go in search of and easily find corroborating sources for *whatever* they believe, and get backed into tighter and tighter corners of extreme ideology.
Ending and Beginning 