It's not the divide; it's the not-divide

Interesting post in BlueOregon today: a video by former news anchor and 2008 GOP Secretary of State candidate Rick Dancer about the "East-West Divide". You can view the video there and read whatever is going on in the comments. Opinions abound, as do misconceptions. I know that when I moved to Corvallis in December 2001, I learned new things about Oregon, especially what it meant to not live in Portland or Eugene. Although I am now back in Portland, I try to keep myself from falling into a careless Portland-centric mindset. I know I won't ever understand what it means to grow up in rural Oregon, but I do not believe I need to have that understand to be a good person or citizens.

I believe this: It's not a matter of East/West that divides Oregonians. Neither is it rural/urban, Portland/everywhere else, white/ethnic minority. Those are all real differences between people, but the list of possible differences from which we may choose is massive. If someone is looking for a difference on which to blame some problem, they can. We all do it; difference is an easy tool with which to build excuses.

When people in Malheur are angry with one another, I'm pretty sure they have little difficulty deciding why it's "their" fault and what is it about "them" that makes them so wrong.

Each of us is alone. We are individuals; we occupy our own skin, our own mind, our own soul. To survive, we form connections: mother-child, sibling, families, friends, and whatever serves a purpose to allow us to escape our essential solitude and unite with others. Connection satisfies deep needs, not to mention providing safety and other resources. Our essential isolation is only a starting point. As humans, we grow into our not-isolatedness in an easy, natural way. Separation and unity are a yin-yang aspect of being human.

As we seek to connect with other people, we have no choice but to identify those who are different from us. The two acts are, in fact, a single act. We differentiate the light and darkness at the same moment, in the same instant of awareness. The trouble we face as humans is that, more often than not, we find ways to keep ourselves separate. There are plenty of books available to explain how we take these differences, transform them into otherness and then blame all of our ills on them. For most humans, the presence of "others" in their world is a relief: someone has to be responsible for evil, suffering, problems, pain. (William Connolly's "Identity/Difference" is a good place to begin; it certainly opened my eyes.)

Where one lives in Oregon - inner eastside Portland, the outskirts of Burns, Cottage Grove, Bandon - affects what (who) one considers "other". A Pendleton cowboy and Hawthorne Boulevard hipster are probably going to have the same lack of regard for each other. Each is likely to thing derogatorily of the other, to assign the blame for many of the state's problems on "them". It's what we humans do: find scapegoats. We know we do, we know it's wrong and we refuse to stop. After all, they do it, too — and they are wrong.

The interaction of otherness between people is difficult enough on a personal level when people dealing directly with one another. What troubles me more than that is using this otherness to drive people even further apart. I am not calling Dancer a bad person; he's simply a political hack taking advantage of people's feelings about their fellow Oregonians to score political points. His videos are presented as if to encourage some kind of connection between eastern and western Oregonians, but they instead feed the existing angers and distances. By focusing on what separates us, and leaving it at that, these pieces only make the divide greater.

I know that I have a different life and perspective than the woman Dancer interviews. For me, that difference is what we share in common. That she is different from me, or I from her, is not a bad thing. It's just what is. If set aside that we different, we can look for what unites us so we can find creative, healing solutions to problems that share the same roots.