I must admit that I’ve been quite taken aback by the conservative, indeed reactionary uproar over Barack Obama’s “Back to School Event” remarks scheduled for later today in Arlington, VA.  What’s happened when we have public school parents who are indignant over the very prospects of their children’s President advising them to “get to work at school – it’s for you and America”?

Is there now nothing that anyone tending to the right or to the left can say that isn’t perceived by the other as partisan, toxic, noxious?  Eugene Robinson in today’s Washington Post reflects on the same loss in the debate about health, “A Middle Ground Gone Missing“.

It’s hard to remember that as recent as five years ago Time magazine could still plausibly editorialize that supposed deep divisions in American society were mere myths.

I had come to expect that when Episcopalians, and then Lutherans, took actions that were actually inclusive of GLBT clergy candidates for ordination, there would be an outcry.  Or that when Sarah Palin tweeted the liberals would hoot.

But when the President can’t speak to school children without ‘the opposition’ (i.e. those who didn’t vote for him) refusing to let them listen lest they be corrupted by his contrary points of view, I have to admit there’s a likely prospect that our divisions are not only deeper than we imagined, but deepening at a rate that should concern us all.

Yet we don’t live ‘on the fringe’ but ‘in the middle’ — we expect people to drive on the right side of the road, and shop in the same grocery stores, and work in the same offices, no matter what their political views.  This week, however, we’ve been given an ugly glimpse of a society where monotone politics determines everything.

Let’s choose not to go there.