I don’t get out anywhere near as much as I used to, so my circle of friends has shrunk quite a bit.

But from what I gather from my online-connections, from relatives to simple online acquaintances, there are a couple of social divisions that are really, really hard and which our leaders seem to shy from addressing.

One of these divisions is on what I’ll call the religion parameter. I bring that up here often.

Another aspect of our society though which is getting more attention, slowly, is that in rural areas particularly a sense of “stuckness”, for lack of a better word, has set in. That is, a kind of physical fatalism, where Americans feel unable to really go out and change where and how they are living.

I wonder how this has come about, and from my research in my genealogy I know that my American ancestors were always moving. No one seemed to stay in one place for more than a single generation.

Today, those of us in urban areas are used to moving every once in awhile, perhaps more often for renters than homeowners. But besides physically relocating, more so we are able to find new jobs, maybe even new types of careers, new friends, etc. There is an urban dynamic that is stressful but also rewarding, in the continual change.

For my friends and relatives in more remote (sometimes much more remote) locales, I gather from what they write/say that there is much more fatalism about their lives. And it is this discomfort with the inevitability of their lives that Trump played upon so well.

But I don’t hear our leaders willing to more openly discuss these existential problems. Oh, here and there some politician will raise the problem of rising drug addictions… but all too often it is just to push for yet another war on drugs.

But they don’t delve into the real problem.

That Americans are having existential crises because life isn’t what they’ve been promised.

Preachers promised. Politicians promised. Advertisers making slick commercials promised.

They’ve all promised what life is supposed to be as an American.

But life isn’t what has been promised.

For the most part life is boring or tragic, sometimes oscillating between the two. And then you die.

What you make of those years of boredom or tragedy or whatever in-between… varies from person to person. But the bottom line is that the preacher and politician and Madison avenue advertiser have all painted a picture of what life was supposed to be like. And when that doesn’t come to pass then the real problems set in.

I’ve known enough addicts (alcoholics, etc.) to know that once one goes down that path the corrective is hard, really hard. And while the peddlers of salvation (religious and secular) will always be there to ply their wares, my belief is that the actual response is idiosyncratic enough that one can never know what will work, and for how long.

Getting this back to politics and our society - I’ve seen folk I know become Trumpers and they willfully blinded themselves to Trump’s overt bigotry and sexism. When something like this happens, I believe we are just looking at a symptom of a deep problem, of a person who is actively seeking to escape the real world.

Trying to cut political deals with such a group is going to be very difficult. Outside of some national crisis that I can’t imagine has a high probability of occurring, I believe we will have to wait until another whole generation dies off before we can overcome the current stuck-ness of American politics.