Someone posted this photo on a Facebook page of a conservative friend of mine to tweak his nose a little. I'm sick of this bull. This photo denigrates the symbiosis between our government which allows for profits (try that in a communist country) and corporations which are privately owned and perhaps doing work for the government (try that in a communist country). We can get all blustery about "I built my business with my own two hands, without government help," (which is sort of the other side of the coin this photo is referencing) but that's also not the point. The point is that only HERE is that even possible, regardless of which party is in power. The differences between Democrats and Republicans has been seriously overblown to create divisions, and we argue about picayune stuff, but in the final analysis, it doesn't matter. If there was a better place to be, most of us would have found it by now. We'll never agree on everything, but we're all Americans and we all benefit from what it means to be American. It's the checks and balances that make it work. Some of those checks and balances were put in place by liberals and some were put in place by conservatives. Suck it up. We're all in this together. What a stupid place we've arrived when we are arguing about who built a stadium. 

Oh, and by the way, more to the point—we built this. We built it all. Not just a stadium in Florida, but all of it. All 50 states. All the cities and all the towns in all the states. That didn't happen by arguing semantics. That happened by people of all stripes working together. I'm a moderate, which basically means I piss everybody off sometimes, but I have to say that when I was in school as a kid I didn't know liberal from conservative, and as an adult I'm astonished by all the bickering over little stuff. I have my own views, which I share when I think they will do good. My main view of the world is that regardless of who you are talking to, we have more in common than we don't. I don't understand the anger. It didn't exist 25 years ago when half my family could have been referred to as Reagan Democrats. Civility has been lost, and we've forgotten that we only became great because we worked together. It was not all wine and roses between our founding fathers, but they had a common goal to emancipate us from the crown. We have common goals now, but we fail to work together. Instead we quibble and question the integrity and patriotism of those who think differently, despite common goals (we mostly argue process, not outcome). That's wrong. That's unAmerican. Americans find the common ground and capitalize on it. That's what made us great. It wasn't conservative values or liberal values that made us great. It was the fact that we didn't let little things like ideology stand in the way of doing great things together. I fear that is lost now.