As you may have noted from some of my recent posts, we recently bought a small waterfront house in my formerly-now-once-again home State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
For the past six weeks I’ve been back and forth several times, and expect to split the year between Ithaca and Rhode Island again like I did for five years prior to selling our prior RI home in June 2013.
During these breaks from Ithaca I’ve come to understand how living full time in Ithaca is a political pressure cooker.
In Ithaca, everything is political. You can’t escape it. You will not be left alone.
You will be made to care.
Even about your coffee, as I joked when we left RI for Ithaca full time:
Please excuse me while I go cry into my organic fair-trade soy latte served in a compostable eco-friendly sustainable cup, a portion of the proceeds of which will go to help indigenous mountain farmers in Central America.
There is no non-political life in Ithaca. It’s Obama’s America, compounded by geographical isolation and liberal homogeneity:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
The personal life is dead, history has killed it.
In Rhode Island, though a thoroughly Democratic state, people are not obsessed.
That’s because Rhode Island is a Democratic state but not a progressive state. No one cares if you don’t care.
It’s like, whatever. It’s refreshing.
[Featured Image by RI cartoonist Don Bousquot]
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY