stone savage

zeitgeist: election year 2004
ortgeist : the United States

I picked up a copy of U.S. News and World Report recently (the Oct 25 edition) and found myself first irritated, and then amused, by an article called “How Deep is the Divide?” written by Jay Tolson.

This article, admittedly, paints a caricature of what sorts of people make up the Republican constituency and which make up the Democratic constituency. The caricatures are as follows:

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“The Red folks are NASCAR-lovin’, gun-owning’, God-fearin’ Republicans who mostly inhabit the rural, suburban, and small-town heartland.

The Blue folks are highly secular, latte-sipping, diversity-embracing Democrats concentrated in the urban areas on the two coasts and around the Great Lakes.”

Now, these caricatures did initially irritate me - for I do not consider myself to be described very well in either of those two statements… but over time, as I thought on it more, I began to chuckle. To some degree, Tolson is dead-on with his descriptions.

But I am increasingly amused at the absence of a Purple description - the one that describes the number of Americans (both voters and not) who are a combination of the two other descriptions. What about giving us our own color?

I’ll try my hand at it. “The Purple folks” (political party may vary) are those non-committal people who want all of the information presented to them before they make a decision. They’re the ones who sit back and watch people bicker over ideologies while interjecting only the occasional question and listening to the responses.

These are the same people who can say “Yes, we went to war in Iraq when perhaps we should not have,” without it meaning they think the American Government is the spawn of Satan. These are the same people who can say “John Kerry’s plan for healthcare sounds better then the Bush Administration’s plan” without it meaning they think Kerry is the Second Coming incarnate.

They sit next to you on the bus, in the cafe, and nod politely to you at the grocery store. They are the John McCain’s of Congress, and the Jimmy Carter’s of Presidents. Yes, they have some political sway to their stances sometimes, but more important to them is not what their party has to say (often to their own detriment) - but what they are able to reason as “sound judgement” in the pursuit of their endeavors. These are the ones who challenge the status quo more in thought than in deed, but will end up in a fight if push comes to shove.

Purple Folks have been a part of American ideaology for a few centuries. We initially called them “American Revolutionaries” as well as “the Framers of the Constitution". They were the ones who said “Uh, a black person isn’t 3/5ths of a person, guys". In the early-1800s we called them Jacksonian-Era Democrats, later that century we called them “the North".

In the last 100 years they have been the ones who said “women should have the right to vote“, “birth control should be an option“, “civil rights do matter“, “science is not a matter of partisan politics". It’s the sort of thinking that has kept the Supreme Court vacancy-free for the longest stretch in 180 years. It’s the mindset that says “what do you mean there’s an “acceptable” level of arsenic in our drinking water? It’s the mindset that says “if the FDA is going to ban L-Tryptophan, why is Prozac still legal?

You see, I think most of America is Purple. The problem with being Purple, however, is that we tend to throw our hands up in the air and let the Blues and the Reds duke it out over what incredibly stupid topic has them most riled up at the moment, while we go back to pondering the things that really matter. But there’s one thing to remember about the Purple Americans - while we’re slow to wrath, we do get there eventually.

Oh, and one more thing, we’ve never lost a fight.

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