Division

My 3rd and 4th grade teacher Mrs. Blake would tell you that one of my least favorite things to learn in her math classes was long division. It was a terribly long and drawn out process that really didn't have much of a point to me. They invented the calculator a long time ago and honestly who’s going to sit down and start finding remainders when they can tap-tap-tap their way to an instant answer. No one, that’s who.

The only thing that I found even moderately acceptable about long division was that it had a set process. There was a way to approach it and if you followed the steps and did everything correctly you would arrive at the correct answer every single time. It was ordered and straightforward and had an elegance about it even if it was annoying as all hell. Decades later and a different kind of division is all around me and it has absolutely nothing ordered about it.

I have had absolutely enough of the rhetoric about how we as a country are more divided than ever before and that we need to heal. So I won’t rehash some missive about an ideal future and how we should bring people together instead of tearing them apart. Regardless, we probably do need to heal though. Until we are allowed to creep out from under the shadow of a pandemic we will have to be alright self-medicating with booze and streaming services.

We as a country are divided, but we have been divided since the very beginning. It wasn’t all sunshine and cupcakes at the Constitutional Convention which lasted 5 months and the dream wasn't realized for an additional 3 years when all of the original colonies had ratified the document. To say we are more divided now than we have ever been is a load of crap. We fought a Civil War! I’d say that was a bit more divisive than where we stand today, though perhaps I am wrong. Either way it doesn’t really matter. Being divided is what makes the United States the great country that it is. The key to using division as a strength is that it has to be accepted and that is precisely where the issue lies now. We’ve stopped realizing that we should accept that others don’t think the same way that we do and then get over it.

The getting over it part is what seems to be the sticking point now. On both sides of the aisle there is a never ceasing nagging and picking and pointing that goes on and on. I blame the internet and social media and the culture that has sprung up around it. The creation of our modern communication happened too quickly to be able to come to grips with its own growing pains. We, as a society and even a species, have never had to adapt to the pace of technology like we have in the last 20 years. I remember having to listen to my old 28.8 modem make terrible noises at me for minutes before I was able to slowly creep through websites and the concept of a digital picture was bananas let alone a digital video. Our brains and our social structures were not built for this kind of change and have had absolutely no chance to adapt to how information is shared and where it is shared. We have failed to realize what is appropriate or not and what is important. We are adrift in our own addiction to content and somehow trying to move ourselves even further into the future.

But I digress.

Division is a key and central to the collective being of the United States. It is our differences and the machinations that come from them that previous generations have been able to leverage in order to build the great country that we live in. They did it by listening to each other, often by necessity, in order to push what they felt was the betterment of our nation and not a personal belief system that isn't grounded in facts but in fluid concepts and generalizations. It is time to stop attacking and then reacting and start having conversations again. We need to make them as civil as we can, but also understand that we cannot make someone stop being who they are. We need to start remembering that pettiness, spite, scorn and prejudice shouldn’t be the tools of choice but instead should be left to the children who will use them no matter what we say. We are supposed to grow out of those things and remember them only as how we aren’t supposed to do things… like long division.