Bi-Partisan? Bi-Something: is it nature or nurture?

As caucus day finally reaches us here in Maine (Sunday, February 10), it's impossible not to dwell on, well, partisanship. After all, the very nature of the caucuses is that there are Democratic and Republican events and choices.

I've had a couple of chances lately to experience and then to muse on the differences between local Democrats and Republicans, and, try as I might, I can't seem to convince myself these differences are merely policy or electoral choices.

Democrats and Republicans here on my small island, where we are of course all mixed up at every meeting, just plain seem to behave differently. And these different behaviors--toward both process and people--appear to originate in quite polarized ways to understand the world.

When we sit down at tables in the evenings or mornings, at town hall or at the schools, to work together to improve local education or economic development or affordable housing, we've got engineers and artists, gay and straight, democrats and republicans all right there elbowing for space. You'd have to say we've got more than bi-partisanship; we've got multi-partisanship. Which is to say that, unlike in larger places, you can't avoid those folks who think and act differently from yourself.

This is an amazingly powerful thing: the democratic ideal, really. It is also a frustrating one, because small changes are hard and long fought. Living and working in a truly multi-partisan environment makes it easy to see why it is so difficult to achieve world peace; to lower greenhouse gas emissions; or to achieve any of the large, international goals so necessary to our survival as a planet.

I'd like to think that, despite our different perspectives and practices, we share the same goals: we want to continuously improve education for our kids; we want to stimulate prosperity for more of our community members; we want to reverse global warming and live at peace as a world.

The real, day to day problem--the one that keeps us from achieving our communal goals and ideals--is we don't really focus on shared goals. Instead, we each tend to focus on our own individual goals, which have to do with ways to approach and interact with the world. And that's when the difference between say, the engineer and the artist, or a democrat and a republican, matters.

How do we move beyond the impasses caused by these differing world views? You'll note I am not going to characterize or judge either: they are just immensely different, and again, my experience is that these individual differences very often get in the way of moving forward toward shared goals. But I do have a funny story, from the world of gay pop culture, that reflects this impasse.

In season three of "The L Word," a Showtime evening soap designed for the lesbian crowd, one of the gals "switches teams:" i.e., she falls for, and moves in with, a man after years in lesbian relationships.

Happens all the time, in both directions.

The funny story part is a scene in which she invites her old pack of lesbian pals to a party, to which her new male honey also invites HIS pack. And, you know, as life as in art: it's awkward. The straight crowd is mostly titillated and thrilled by the beautiful young lesbians; and the lesbians are pretty dismissive of the kind of unconscious rudeness and judgement that wafts from the straight crowd (here is where you can insert your own republican/democrat analogies . . . ).

Because it is a TV show, the writers--to break the ice and move along the party, not to mention the show's message--sit them down to play a trivia-type game, one in which the players make up their own questions. "Who is Terrell Owens?" one of the straight guys ask. The lesbians look nonplussed. "Only one of the greatest receivers in the history of football!" the guy guffaws. The lesbian group shrugs diffidently, as a unit. "Who's Kathleen Hanna?" one of the lesbians ask. Now it is the straight groups turn to look nonplussed. "The most famous founder of riot grrrl music!"

Etc.

A little black and white, but it makes its point: as privileged americans, we tend to live in highly segmented worlds--our fiercely won and proclaimed self-identities dictating much of our everyday choices and world views. We read only the news we want to read (thanks to RSS feeds and customized emails); we listen to only the music to which we want to listen; and when it comes down to solving a community problem--we see only the world each of us individually wants to see.

It's the paradox of democracy; and we're gonna have to be a little more creative than we've been for the last 20 years to really make it work before we melt down the planet.