Two visions

There are a lot of articles about the two American parallel universes that we are going to have to live with for the coming months. I’m already trying to wean myself from any political articles on this without total success. I was nevertheless impressed by another duality that Tom Friedman talks about in the the New York Times this morning - These are networks of nations with opposing battlefronts. He calls them “resistance” and “inclusion”.

They also have some common elements, One tries to bury the past. The other tries to work toward a more connected and balanced future. Russia and Ukraine are one pair. The Middle East is more complicated but also has opposing forces. The same alternatives might be seen in the United States.

Life is not quite that simple, of course. There are elements of the past that we are discarding and immediately adapting the new thing - like an acquaintance who thinks AI can solve all kinds of things that it clearly can’t. We have abandoned some of the civility that creates a greater degree of trust. On the other hand we hang on to things that don’t seem to please anybody in a new and changing world. But perhaps “either-or” needs to give way to “both-and”.