Do you wake up in the morning with a joyful mindset, believing all is well and loving thy neighbor? Or is a part of you bracing and expecting the next turbulence to unfold in the news, or on your social media feed?
We know there is a political divide in this country. But it isn’t only along party lines.
The divide today is also between people who are exhausted by animus and those who seem emboldened to spew it.
There is a divide between people who remain engaged with the news of the day and those who say they can only bear so much and avoid watching it at all.
And perhaps most troubling, there is a divide between love and hate. We seem to vacillate between caring and apathy.
Recent events illustrate how stark that divide can feel. At the recent BAFTA Awards, the emotional impact on Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo when an activist with Tourette’s syndrome shouted the N-word as they stood on stage appeared to be an afterthought.
That incident came on the heels of former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama being portrayed as apes in an image shared on President Donald Trump’s social media account.
Rather than an understanding of the outrage many Black Americans felt about a stereotypical depiction that evokes a painful history of racism, the response from Trump and many of his supporters was that he did not personally post the image. Days later, the president appeared to be persuaded to apologize.
Similar moments touch our own lives as we engage with friends and acquaintances who are not aligned with our political thinking. Those exchanges can reveal how indifferent people can be to the harm that words carry.
In late February, Democratic State Rep. Esther Panitch received a private message on Facebook that was antisemitic. She later shared that she responded by having a tree planted in Israel in the person’s name — someone she had never met — through the Jewish National Fund USA. Panitch included a message that reads, “May some good come from your obsessive hate.”
“There are people who say don’t give her any attention, you’re amplifying it,” Panitch told SaportaReport. “I don’t see it like that. I see it as you’re coming at me. I’m coming right back.”
Panitch said that as a politician and a trial lawyer, hateful mail or online messages are frequently sent to her, but being Jewish brings an added layer of hate.
On Feb. 4, a North Carolina man was sentenced in Macon by the Department of Justice to five years in prison for sending antisemitic threats to Panitch and the rabbi of Temple Beth Israel in Macon.
The women received antisemitic postcards in 2024 following the passing of a bill defining antisemitism. A month earlier, Rabbi Elizabeth Bahar testified before the Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee in support of the bill.
Panitch said the normalization of hate concerns her.
“It used to be that antisemitism was something shameful. People weren’t open about it, but now they are,” she said.
Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie said some of the dynamics playing out today are tied to shifts in political behavior over the past decade.
In many cases, she said, supporters of Trump have adopted elements of his style.
“What we’re seeing now is partisan polarization,” she said, in which people interpret events through political loyalty and become “susceptible to particular arguments.”
In some cases, she said, the divide deepens into hyper-polarization.
“That’s when people don’t just disagree with the other side,” Gillespie said. “They actually think the other side is dangerous.”
At that point, people stop seeing humanity in the person they disagree with politically, she said.
“It’s when you start to view people you disagree with as having to be stopped at all costs,” she said.
Social media can intensify that dynamic because people can feel freer to troll or provoke others, Gillespie added.
I saw a version of that play out recently in an exchange on social media.
Last weekend, I came across a comment responding to a post supporting the U.S. war with Iran. The commenter shared a link to an AI-generated video depicting Trump in the Oval Office dressed in hip-hop attire and speaking in exaggerated “gangster” language twice using the N-word.
The person who shared it is someone I know and have interviewed in the past for local news stories.
When I challenged him in the thread, he said he thought that because a Black man created the video, it was okay to share. I said, I thought that was his excuse to share it.
What struck me most in the exchange with him and two others who came to his defense was the absence of any sensitivity or concern about why sharing the video might be offensive.
In my view, that reflects the struggle to recognize one another’s humanity in today’s political climate.
Gillespie said she expects the divide to remain for some time.
“If we aren’t going to see the humanity in people,” she said, “it ends up delaying the wake-up call that might push people toward civility.”
She continued: “Right now, I don’t see polarization abating.”
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