I loathe Facebook when national news breaks. Frightening opinions, uninformed diatribes, and fallacious attacks, some from people I once viewed as reasonable, litter my newsfeed and I'm reminded again why I avoid that virtual place.
Partly thanks to social media (especially Facebook and Twitter), we have become a Centrifugal Nation compelled by the radicalizations of our ideologies to flee the center. We will soon be spun out, Balkanized, spilling into camps of blind fanaticisms -- far too lost to recover a sense of balance. I spent the majority of my political life identifying as a humanist which, I guess, labelled me as a "lefty" and liberal... and I was fine with that. But I now, more than ever, recognize the necessity of the Center. When in the middle, voices become centripetal forces which pull inward and hold the disparate pieces of our nation as part of the whole. We may not like some (or many) of these different views... but we practiced (a kind of) reason as a means to seek resolution. Now we spin outward in our virtual disconnections. Spin, spin, spin... and the center is almost lost as is our troubled, but often earnestly searching national soul.
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