In two other posts I’ve pondered the same quote by Reinhold Niebuhr, wherein he has this to say: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.” Do read the rest of the quote, click here if you’re so inclined, because he goes on so gracefully to talk about faith, love, and – wait for it – forgiveness.
BEHIND THE SCENES: For weeks now, an evasive idea has been trying to form itself on my cognitive drawing board, having to do with depictions of absurd, segregated services reserved for conservatives or liberals. At first I thought of separate traffic lights at any given intersection, one set of red lights for the conservatives and another for the liberals. Then I realized how unlikely it would be, in such an imagined reality, that conservatives and liberals would even share the same roads. If nothing else, there would have to be fancy toll roads for conservatives only and old, beat up, public roads for the liberals. So I scratched that.
Then notions of segregated meteorological services for conservatives and liberals began appearing on my internal drawing board. I imagined a conservative weatherperson standing in the pouring rain with a mic in one hand and an umbrella in the other outlining the counter factuals: sunny, low humidity, time for a picnic. You know, “fake weather.” But then a staff researcher found the YouTube video below, published way back in 2012. Damn it! That’s when I decided to go with the simple shit storm forecast.
I thought I’d call this “conceptual relativity,” but then I settled on “the relativity of eligibility” to highlight one of the sociological consequences of marginalization and polarization.