I suppose it was my Uncle Harry who warned me to avoid labels and to refuse to let other people label me.

“Labels are for lazy or stupid people,” he said, “they label people so that they don’t have to think about or listen to anything anybody else says. Don’t let them label you.”

Harry was prescient, more than he could have imagined. But he would be sad to learn that in our time, we label people constantly, and it is tearing our country apart.

People most often accuse me of being a creature of the “left,” because sometimes I write critically of President Trump. And as Harry said, the label gives them a pass; they don’t have to think or listen to anything me or anyone else who disagrees with them says.

The people on the “left,” of course, do precisely the same thing, and nothing could make the corporate, pliant, and bribeable politicians on both sides happier.

Like middle school brats on the playground, we hurl names at one another, wounding when we can, no longer listening at all. We call this our civic duty.

As long as we can be manipulated into thinking in only those two very narrow and mostly failed ways,  we will stay too busy snarling and fuming at each other to see where the real treats are.

This is a profound distraction from the real business of living in a democracy.

I wonder if I will ever live to see the day when those angry white Wisconsin factory workers and those angry black and Latino service workers realize that they are both on the same side and that they are both being screwed in precisely the same way by the very people they parrot and follow.

The left and the right are the greatest boon ever to the rich and powerful, many of us now deluded into thinking we have real choices in a system where there are no longer any real choices at all.

We simply have two versions of the same thing, disguised as something different.

The corporate media is eagerly complicit in this great fraud.

Just ask the lobbyists and billionaire donors if they care which side wins. Fox News and MSNBC each pretend to be champions of one side or the other. Each are raking in billions of dollars, convincing us that we need to listen to them.

They have turned our precious governmental structure into a mud-wrestling, keeping score and egging on the calls for blood.

For our corporate media, the fighting on the “left” and the “right” make a lot of people rich. They support the divide in any way they can, every day. We are nothing if not trusting and gullible.

I should stay there are still many journalists fighting hard, to tell the truth in a poisonous and complex environment. They are heroes too.

I wrote a piece the other day about why it was that President Trump is so successful and so underestimated.

The piece was very much about understanding him, not hating him.

Mary was offended because I dared to have an opinion that was not hers and said some “nasty” things about him, her chosen leader.

She tagged me as someone on the “left” and dismissed me as some robotic zombie.

“You seem pretty thoughtful and articulate, but I don’t think you can say some of your writing isn’t a nasty left or right thing. It’s pretty clear what you think of our President. Let’s hope he gets re-elected for the sake of this great country,” she wrote.

Sorry, Maria, it isn’t a crime to dislike things about our President, and nothing I wrote about him was nasty or false. Maybe you ought to read it.

She was immediately set upon by other posters, including one man from the “left,” who urged her to take her meds.

She hadn’t read my piece, and the angry person on the “left,” who hadn’t read it either, dismissed her as crazy for liking the President.

There are a lot of people out there who think it’s fun to trade insults all day with strangers on social media. This is the very antithesis of thought or reason.

So there we are, two nations confined at war within one national boundary.

There are so many ways to look at the world and the people who run it.

There are democrats and socialists, autocrats and benign dictators and royalists, Kings and Queens and lunatics, old man and young women, monsters and fascists, and a dozen kinds of parliamentary legislatures.

Each has something to show us and teach us, for good or bad. The people in so many countries are better off than we are, and in so many countries they are worse off.

We learn nothing from any of them; we are too busy clawing and scraping to preserve a broken, struggling system. The left and the right have given us blinders and taught us how not to see.

In America, we think there are only two ways of governing, and all of the others are threatening to our way of life and are instantly dismissed.

All of the real thinkers and innovators are shut out of this very closed system, they don’t ever get to shout with people on cable news.

The idea of the left and the right have paralyzed us, turned our politics into a never-ending game of chess, one side stale-mating the other again and again so that nothing can ever change and no idea can ever prevail.

Is this really what we are fighting with each other about?

I wrote to Mary and told her that I was not committing any social crime by criticizing the President, and she had every right to like him.

They once called that democracy, but the people on top have figured out that as long as we hate one another, we will not come after them. And they are right.

We hate the other label much more than we hate the people who have raped the middle class and sucked almost all of the national wealth up to the very top.

I told Mary I believe the left and the right are both cults in different ways, their adherents people who have no reason to think anymore, no ability to communicate,  no curiosity to listen, no ideas to inspire, no way to cross bridges civilly or rationally.

They are zombie people to me, mouthing platitudes and parroting their masters. Thomas Jefferson would have thrown himself off a bridge.

I told Mary it was an insult to me to be labeled in that way.

Uncle Harry, if you are looking down on this mess called American politics, you are a prophet.

Mary did not answer me, of course. The idea of actually having a conversation with me or anyone who presumes to think for themselves is terrifying to ideologues; they have learned to hate and resent, not to listen.

The left and the right has no label for someone who thinks.

I told Mary it was offensive to me to suggest that I need a political party or movement to tell me what to think. I see very little evidence that the left or the right is capable of much thought at all, let alone inspiration.

I have no illusions about Mary. I wrote to her so that I could feel better; she is not interested in how I think or what I think. I wish I could never persuade her that her brain is shrinking to the size of a pea.

And isn’t that the point of them, the left or the right? To make sure we don’t think. If we did,  we might look at what is happening and grab our torches.

The left and the right are killing the American consciousness, our memory, our history.

They are both drying up our minds and turning us into parrots, drones, and social bigots.

Since they have no real ideas for moving our country forward or helping the people in need, or to stop screwing working and middle-class people, they chose instead to teach us how to hate, but never listen, to demand, but never yield, to rage but never compromise.

We just gave away trillions of dollars in “stimulus” money?  How many poor people are safer or less poor today?

George Orwell foresaw the awful consequences of left and right: two rigid and corrupt cultures pretending to war with one another, manipulating lazy and weak-minded people into fighting with fellow citizens who are not their enemies and have no reason to hate each other.

I am an urban creature; I live in rural America now, Trump country.

Labels aside, we have no quarrels with one another. We want the same things for ourselves and our families.

We want work and love and health and a safe world for our children. Outside of labels, we are not fighting at all.

Imagine a world without left and a right for a minute.

They called it the United States.

The idea that we are enemies comes from outside, not inside.

It is yet another awful legacy of the left and right, whose survival depends on hatred and grievance.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their understanding of their history,” wrote Orwell.

The people on the left and right deny and obliterate their understanding of history. This is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. This is not what the immigrants came to America to seek and find.

The idea was for us to be one people, on guard against kings and tyranny and corruption, each supporting the right to safety and freedom and opportunity.

Is that really the message of the left or the right today?

We have failed to honor that promise. We have no one but our selves to blame.

Doublethink, wrote Orwell, means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Doublethink is the currency of the left and the right. I’ll go with my own thoughts, thanks.

Real political power in contemporary America lies in learning how to tear human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of someone else’s choosing.

It’s a perfect definition of the left and the right. Tearing minds apart and putting the pieces together in new shapes.

There is a third way out there, and I believe it is coming to lift us and take us to a better place. I see our savior as a kind of political messiah, man or woman, rising from the dead hearts and stagnant minds of the left and the right to bring us back to light.

I am hopeful because at root, very little divides us as human beings. We need a different way.

You know the way to run off a nasty warrior on the left or the right? Ask them to think about something; they will not know what to do but flee in terror, like chickens running from a weasel, shouting nasty insults as they run.

Uncle Harry, you would be proud of me for this one thing, at least.

I have no interest in joining a cult or putting any labels on myself.

I am sometimes right and often wrong, but I don’t ever label anybody, and I will fight as hard as I can to keep on thinking for myself.