Amnesia

The following picture was posted to LinkedIn today.

Then I have some prime Montana oceanfront property to sell you - because I'm betting you don't remember the West Coast, either.

Fortunately, we don't have to remember, because Google sees all and knows all, and has plenty of pictures of President Obama hugging uniformed servicemembers. In fact, when you start typing "Obama hugging" into Google, before you even finish, "Obama hugging military" is suggested - even before "Obama hugging Michelle," as in Michelle Obama - the first lady.

The work of about two seconds.

But despite the fact that Google will offer up all of the pictures you could ever want of President Obama hugging men and women in uniform, the posting on LinedIn started attracting comments from people who were positive that the implied accusation, the President Obama didn't care about the military was accurate.

Now I know that for a lot of people, this is evidence of personal or racially-motivated animosity, but I see it simply being partisanship and the self-righteousness that goes with it - the "Everything I needed to know about you, I learned from your party affiliation" school of thought that has been on the rise in the United States over the past couple of decades or so. As it has progressed, this partisanship has become a means of removing moral ambiguity about an otherwise unknown person - in effect, since I know that [Insert Name Here] is a [Insert Opposing Party Affiliation Here], I can intuit from this that he shares none of my commitments to what is good and correct in the world, no matter how outlandish that intuition might be.

As the willingness to separate people into Good and Evil based on their perceived politics grows, it will interfere more and more with out ability to work together. Which is to be expected, and is perhaps inevitable - nations don't last forever, and the United States will be no exception. But the push to hurry the process along seems odd at times.