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purple people eater

From an AP wire story regarding people in San Francisco not wanting to go to so-called "red states".
"I have family in Idaho, but I told my wife we're not going to visit them now. It's all Republicans there," said Ron Schmidt, a public relations executive. "We have family in Indiana and I don't want to go there either."

To which I say: don't be an ignorant jerk! Look, I understand the frustration of being a liberal minded person and having to try to deal with the reality of four more years of Bush. I'm one of those people, living in a so-called "red state" to boot. But with that said, this whole "red state/blue state" thing is ridiculous and out of hand. It's just a way to get people to not look at the reality of the situation, that the nation is not so cut & dried liberal/conservative, red/blue. It's divided, to be sure, but not in the way it's constantly presented. To me, nothing illustrates this better than the Purple Maps:

State by state:

County by county: (I don't know why Alaska & Hawaii are missing from this map)

Check out all that purple. No one state is either ocean blue or blood red. And look at the blue counties in red states and the red counties in blue states. The country kind of looks like a bruise, which is a rather apt metaphor if you think about it.

So please, let's stop the reactionary nonsense. Turn off your Sean Hannity or Al Franken, read objective news (or do as close to that as possible given the state of the media) and talk to people of the opposing viewpoint. You might not agree with their viewpoints or their rationales, but at least it'll do some good in trying to deconstruct this whole "blue on the coasts, red in the middle" myth.

Now, off my soapbox.

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