Quote Originally Posted by Political Hack View Post
America is addicted to divisiveness right now. The political vile and the 24-hour news cycle proves it. That could've very easily been a part of the speech before the terror attack... it's relevant either way. I agree with him that we, as a country, need to start focusing and celebrating what brings us together and unifies us a little more and stop broadcasting what differentiates us and divides us a little more.

The crazy black and white whacknut conservatives and flighty-ass overly sensitive lunatic liberals get all the headlines. Nobody puts normal people on TV anymore.

I realize this is "political" but it's not really a polarizing "political stance." I'm joining the Rodney King political party of "Can't we just all get along"...
The 24-hour news cycle and social media is certainly an exacerbating factor, but I would not say America is addicted to divisiveness. There is a portion of American that views everything through an identity based lense and their entire focus is on how the government is favoring one group over others. Then there is the almost complete abandonment of the idea that there is anything that shouldn't be dictated by politics. Thirty years ago, there was a legitimate argument that people on the right were the ones that wanted the government meddling in personal business. The people on the right haven't gotten much better (they've shifted pretty hard on decriminalizing marijuana and same sex marriage and related issues, but it's not really a philosophical switch where they decided the government was overreaching; it was just a political shift), but people on the left have gotten 1,000 times worse. They went from at least pretending to believe that individual liberty existed outside of economic transactions, to believing that the government has the right to dictate how much broccoli you eat. You had longstanding social conventions (e.g., go to the bathroom of the sex you can pass for) that they decided should be revoked and addressed by law. They abandoned any support for RFRA and the idea that there should be any accommodation for religious belief or practice (at least if you are not part of the right identity group) and actually countenanced purposefully burdening religious exercise to make a point (e.g. birth control litigation). The COVID stuff was when they got the nastiest, doing things like essentially required people that had recovered from COVID within the past 3 months for not getting a shot, despite them having better immunity than people that had gotten one shot 12 months prior. Or applying the vaccine mandate for government contractors for remote workers.

It's no longer feasible for most people to just pay taxes but otherwise more or less ignore the government and go about their business. Basically everybody that works or has a family member work for a government contractor, a healthcare facility taking medicare or medicaid, works for a elementary or secondary public school or private or public institute of higher learning, or one of the military branches is at risk of being collateral damage (or targeted damage).

Stop telling people what kind of water heater they can buy, stop trying to compel people to participate in speech they don't agree with, stop telling people that their rights depend on which identity group they belong to, and stop going out of your way to use government powers discomfort people you don't like rather than just trying to accomplish legitimate government interests like the provision of public goods, and you'd see a lot less people being "divisive".