A man who lives in a Boeing 727 in Oregon (2020)

Personally, I prefer Astoria. No beach, but it's a cooler vibe.

[edit] Just to add, I have a (non-Jewish) uncle who retired to Coos Bay. He's become one of the most extremist and racist people I've ever met, in addition to being a hardcore anti-vaxer. He wasn't like that when I was a kid. Living in that environment changed him radically for the worse.

re: the accountant, I left. I wrote her an email explaining why I couldn't work with her. She apologized and said she didn't realize what it was, that it was a gift from her daughter, something about their Finnish heritage, and it was supposed to be horse heads. I found a nice Jewish guy to do my taxes.

It's probably good to have a dialogue about it, and you should note the person's ethnicity as well.

Try Google imaging "hindu lucky symbol." I'm not entirely convinced that a people should be forced to entirely give up on a symbol they were using first, before it got misappropriated.

I'm in a deeply red part of the country, most of my neighbors (all of whom are non-white) are hardcore Trump supporters. Exactly zero behave or talk like this. I am not saying what the grandparent described is false, rather I would suggest that the current political zeitgeist is exceptionally reactionary. In a state like Oregon, in a small town just outside Portland, a legendarily kooky Left-wing enclave, that the folks who are on the Right are significantly more "out there" than is typical. Meanwhile, I'm in a heavily red area of a heavily red state and nobody feels the need to be "out there" because the localized norm is being on the Right.

So, I won't say that the divide isn't quite stark, but I think it's easy to look at the most extreme examples from each side and see the chasm that separates, which can lead to imagining a much bigger divide than actually exists. Political zealotry operates on a bell curve like pretty much anything else involving people.

It goes both ways but the media tends to sugar coat and/or gloss over one side more than the other.

This is true in the large picture, and certainly any respect or trust you might build is being undermined daily by both the tone and content of what people see online. But on a personal level - not just tactically or logistically - I do think there's a chance of finding common ground if you talk to each person you encounter as an individual worthy of respect. The range of what I consider lunatic beliefs in this country runs the full gamut, and people who can't make sense of the stew of (mis)information end up treating it like a buffet. But individual crazy beliefs can be gently corrected.

For instance, when the woman told me that child abuse had just been legalized in California, I said "that doesn't sound right." She insisted. So then she, her husband and I all googled it on our phones until we found the source of the rumor she had heard, and read through the actual law it was referring to. It's a new law which gives judges more latitude as to whether someone convicted of a sex offense has to be put on a life-long sex offender registry. I suggested it probably has to do with "Romeo and Juliet" situations in which it's unfair to put an 18 year old on a sex offender registry for having consensual sex with a 17 year old. Suddenly a light went on over this woman's head. Turns out, they have a son who just turned 18, whose girlfriend is 17, and they've been "real worried about it". Well, now this law doesn't seem so bad, and just maybe Gavin Newsom isn't drinking the blood of babies. Maybe she'll even tell her facebook friends that's not what it's about. But how would that happen if I'd just told her she was an idiot?

My Dad had this rule in the house that if he ever used a word we didn't know - which happened frequently - we had to take out the dictionary and look it up together. Once or twice, he even had to acknowledge that he had used something imprecisely. The pattern was: Admit if you don't know something; looking it up; acknowledge if your assumptions were incorrect; always seek out reliable sources to back your argument. This was so ingrained in me, and I took it so much for granted that others knew how to do that, that I often feel like a stranger in a strange land now. It took me a long time to realize that people just never had that experience. No one ever showed them that, so they could never get past the first part, admitting they don't know something. It's not that people are too dumb to do it, they just don't have access to that part of their intellect or the emotional capacity for self-doubt. Often because they grew up surrounded by people for whom acknowledging a lack of knowledge or admitting a mistake was seen as being weak.

This is why the people I'm talking about use phrases like "I did my own research" by which we know they mean something diametrically opposite to actual research. And why the dark patterns in social media that amplify echo chambers have such a stunningly asymmetrical effect in propagating lies over facts. "Confirmation bias" only exists when you're right and someone else is wrong - an in-group only exists when there's an out-group. So I think that showing the way past that first admission of possibly being wrong, and going straight to sources, whilst treating people with respect and not as a member of some other "group" just because they say foolish things, is how each of us can have the most impact in beating back the crazy.