ME

Book stack

What a person sees in anything in life is subjective. Some may see weeds in what some people see as a garden. Some say the shirt is pink, others say its salmon. The same hold true for what people would see in a stack of books. People can find many meanings in seemingly meaningless words.

 The books that I stacked in the library this week were titled “Past Worlds”, “Chronicle of the 20th Century”, “We the People”, and “Civil War”. None of the books were are very related to each other, though a few may have come from similar sections. All were books that were laying on top of some shelves to be put away. I stacked them up in several ways, but this particular way I thought fit the best. When I uploaded it onto my computer and started thinking about what they could possibly be connected to, I immediately thought of the politics. The “Civil War” made me thing of partisan politics in the US. I thought of the molding of politics during the 20th Century and the dramatic changes it has gone through. I thought of the connection between what Democrats and Republicans were known for in the “Past World” before FDR and how the underwent a change starting with his presidency. Since then Republicans have become the conservative party and the Democratic party is the more liberal.

The bitter differences in the parties that exist now seem to have been set in stone at the end of the 20th Century, further dividing the people of the US than ever before. I see in the titles of the book this sense of division in politics over the course of the last century as a sort of civil war, where people have become very intense in their devotion to the ideologies behind each party. Instead of people aligning themselves with various politicians on their stance in general, we are aligning ourselves solely with a particular party, regardless of the character, the past history or the actual views of particular candidates who claim to be members of their particular party. It seems to be a thing of the past for politics to coexist with two major parties not being sharply divided.