[With apologies to The Kingston Trio]

Because I’m a registered Republican and have given money in the past to a select few Democratic candidates, over the past few months both my snailmail and my email have been deluged with appeals for money and support from both parties and from candidates from both political parties. Each party and every candidate insists that the very existence of the United States is threatened if they don’t get adequate funding in order to defeat the “evil other.”

Now, I’d be the first to admit that there are politicians in each party that the respective party – and the world – could and should do without. Parties being what they are – greedy and without ethics [ethics are only used in judging the other party] – that’s not going to happen.

Depressingly predictable is that the vast majority of these desperate-sounding appeals are close to fact-free, along the lines of “if the other party gains/maintains control of Congress, the sky will fall.” The specifics of how the sky will fall, of course, are also general, but behind the vague generalities, the implications are obvious.

If those free-spending free-sex Democrats get control, they’ll take away our guns, require abortions, indoctrinate our kids with gay and lesbian propaganda, give the vote to every illegal immigrant, require paying people for not working, and bankrupt the entire country, and that’s just for starters.

If those authoritarian Republican Trump clones get control, they’ll take away civil rights from anyone not a white male, ban all abortions for any reason, fortify and militarize the southern border, pass more tax cuts for selfish millionaires, keep the minimum wage as low as possible, accelerate climate change and destroy the environment in a generation, and that’s just for starters.

I’ll also admit that there are politicians close to those extremes, not that most would ever admit it publicly, but I did spend twenty years in the Washington, D.C., political climate and there have always been extremists, just not so many that are so extreme. Even so, I’ve never seen such vitriol on such a wide scale – not in the fifty-plus years that I’ve been in and watched U.S. politics.

And that’s why I don’t like any of them very much – this frantic sky-is-falling, violent-hatred fund-raising just exacerbates the current polarization… and by engaging in it, they may well permanently fracture the underlying consensus required for a democratic political system.

Over the last week or so, I’ve gotten proposed comments citing articles by various military “authorities,” published in magazines or by organizations of, shall we say, dubious provenance. Many of the citations or facts in the articles appear to be largely accurate, but many are not.

What they all have in common, however, is a bottom line that Vladimir Putin had no choice but to attack Ukraine because the Ukrainians didn’t scrupulously “keep” the Minsk accords and because the evil Ukrainians were shelling their own people in the Donbas, i.e., the Russian-speaking sympathizers who have been fighting for years to secede from Ukraine. In fact, for practical purposes, some of those areas have seceded in all but name, but even Russia agrees that those regions aren’t legally part of Russia.

What exactly did Ukraine do to merit an invasion? Ukraine didn’t seize Russian territory. And it did agree not to join NATO. It’s a nation of 40 million people that’s hardly a military threat to Russia. It did get involved in a nasty civil war in one part of its own territory, but that war hardly threatened Russia.

And, oh yes, the apologists also claim that the Russia of today is not at all the same as the USSR, because now Russia is “capitalist,” except that the apologists conveniently ignore that quite a few “capitalists” who displease Putin end up missing, dead, or commit suicide improbably and that the Russian economy still doesn’t function all that well.

What this also ignores is that Vladimir Putin is 69 years old and a product of the USSR. In terms of his acts, and his methodology, he’s little different from Josef Stalin. Opposition is crushed ruthlessly. Even non-violent dissent isn’t tolerated. Political opponents end up imprisoned or dead. Neighboring nations are threatened and/or invaded.

Is Ukraine perfect? Hardly. It’s experienced more corruption that it should have, and likely been brutal in dealing with the equally-brutal secessionists, but it’s made considerable efforts to improve, and it’s more than clear that its people have no desire to be ruled or governed by Russia. That, by itself, should weigh much more than Putin’s hurt feelings over the fact that the Ukrainians weren’t “perfect” in abiding with an agreement forced on them at gunpoint.

And no, I won’t publish references to such apologia that read like they were crafted by Putin trolls.

In the war between Russia and Ukraine, who’s actually in charge of the Russian offensive? Ostensibly, Vladimir Putin is. But last week Putin declared that attacks against the steel plant in Mariupol would stop and that Russian troops would “blockade” the plant. Since then, there have been a reported 35 air strikes and at least one more ground assault, apparently repulsed.

Over the course of the war, Putin has declared several safe passage areas for civilian evacuations, corridors where Russian armed forces then repeatedly attacked and killed unarmed fleeing civilians.

Last Friday, Brigadier General Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s Central Military District, stated that the Russian Armed Forces planned essentially to invade/occupy Moldova’s eastern territory bordering Ukraine less than 30 miles from the port city of Odessa in order create a land corridor to Crimea. What makes this interesting is that, if the translation is correct, Minnekayev is a very low-ranking general.

Yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov charged NATO with waging “in essence” a proxy war with Russia by supporting Ukraine and warned the West not to underestimate the elevated risks of nuclear conflict over Ukraine.

While all these statements and actions demonstrate is that the Russian military intends to destroy as much of Ukraine as possible and will rattle the nuclear sabre in an effort to pressure the U.S. and other allies of Ukraine into restricting military aid to the Ukrainians. But it is rather unusual that, in an authoritarian state such as Russia, there are so many different, and sometimes conflicting statements.

Such acts and statements also suggest two possibilities. Either Putin doesn’t have the control he projects and the conflict is being driven by the Russian military complex or that Russia at all levels that matter at present is hell-bent on grinding Ukraine into dust.

Neither is particularly reassuring.

When the donut shop on South Main Street opened, I gave it a year at most. In the nearly thirty years we’ve lived here, I’ve seen two donut shops and three bakeries open… and close. After close to ten years, the donut shop is going stronger than ever. It’s open from six in the morning until two in the afternoon.

How did it manage when so many others failed? I’m guessing, but it has several factors going for it. First, its donuts are by far the best in town. Second, it’s open every day of the week. Third, it has a drive-up window that’s relatively easy to access. Fourth, it serves a range of coffee, tea, and smoothie beverages, and fifth, it has a range of baked pastry-type sandwiches [I don’t know how else to describe them] for lunch.

The donuts are slightly more expensive than any others in town, roughly ten percent more.

There is one thing that bothers me, though. Given my schedule, or my wife’s, we’re almost never free to visit the donut shop until it’s close to closing time, and by then, the shop is almost always out of glazed donuts – my wife’s favorite. There are old-fashioned plain and old-fashioned glazed donuts, and chocolate iced donuts, and plenty of glazed donut holes, but no glazed donuts.

Now, the owner has been successful, when so many have failed. So who am I to suggest change?

At the same time, if he’s always out of glazed donuts by one o’clock, and he has left-over donut holes, wouldn’t it make more sense – and dollars – to bake a few more glazed donuts?

Then, maybe he does, and I have the misfortune only to show up when there aren’t any left. And that’s the danger of relying too heavily on personal and anecdotal information.

In the May issue of The Atlantic, entitled “How Social Media Made America Stupid,” Jonathan Haidt offers a critical and provocative insight into how and why the United States has become so “stupid” and politically polarized. Personally, I feel that he doesn’t make the complete case for stupidity, since he seems to ignore the impacts social media has on concentration, depth of knowledge, and other factors, but his analysis of the cause of political polarization is spot on.

In the case of political polarization, there are two main factors. One is, predictably, social media. The other is the nature of group dynamics.

Social media, and features like “share,” “like,” and “retweet,” especially on Facebook and Twitter, allow users to make their views known, and given the algorithms and human nature, particularly negative feelings, which Haidt calls “social darts.” These social darts impact human behavior. When someone is vilified on social media, justly or unjustly, the economic and societal impact can be profound.

Those most active on social media are the most “progressive” liberals, followed by the activist ultra-conservatives. No other groups come close.

Why the social dart mechanism creates political polarization results from group dynamics. Those generally on the left, for example, pay far more attention to the views of those who share many of the same beliefs, usually but not always Democrats, and moderate Democrats who oppose almost any aspect of the “woke” agenda of the progressives can be and are often targeted by the “progressive” liberals.

Republicans largely ignore liberal social darts, except to mock them, but are fearful of expressing views, even views previously expressed by noted Republicans, that would get them vilified as RINOs [Republicans In Name Only].

As a result, the greatest impact of social darts falls within social groups, and because the most active “social darters” are the extremists on both sides, those social darts have the impact of silencing dissenters who in the past have exercised a moderating influence.

Add to that the fact that social media, because of its very structure, oversimplifies complex issues, and the result is that both the “left” and the “right” have become more and more dominated by the simplistic extremes.

In short, no matter how much you blame the other “side,” the real problem lies within your side.