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Last Thursday night, standing in a neighborhood bar with friends, I rode the once-in-a-generation highs elicited by Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. It was a moment that finally opened my eyes to what really makes this a great nation: the millions of life stories and experiences that, when woven together, create what we all collectively recognize as the American Dream.

Then earlier this week, as I tuned in to the Republican National Convention, I was struck by one theme that constantly hung on the high-tech monitors around the edges of the arena: Country First. There were speeches and gestures and ceremonies and rituals that all focused on the potent power of patriotism. Men cried as they said the Pledge of Allegiance. They prayed in earnest for God’s protection over the United States, all with a striking absence of people of color.

It was as if a chasm opened up before my mind.

On one side are people like me, those who believe that America’s diversity lies at the core of who and what we are as a nation. There is no America without the Americans who have come from every corner of the globe and every path of the human experience to forge a true land of opportunity. We strengthen America by strengthening its citizens; we grow by constantly adding to the melting pot, enriching ourselves while creating a more diverse country for our children. America is dynamic – it is special because it is unique.

On the other side are those who believe that the concept of America should be placed above the needs of everyone except the majority. They believe that a piece of cloth with stars and stripes is so sacred – so holy, perhaps – that it deserves more legal protection than some of the human beings who live beneath it. Anything that goes against the grain of the status quo is to be feared; outsiders are welcome to live here, provided they accept an institutionalized second-class status, so long as it doesn’t create inconvenience for those who rely on their services. It’s Country First, People Second, and anyone who falls outside of the norm – or who questions the norm – is marginalized, ostracized. You can even have your rights legally stripped away from you based on who you choose to love.

When presented in these terms, there is no middle ground in this chasm. There can be no purple in the sea of red and blue. But can that be?

Here’s where I struggle: being a God-fearing, traditional-values conservative in this country doesn’t automatically mean that you’re a Bible-thumping, hate-speech-spewing bigot. I cannot assume that people who believe in Country First are prone to dislike/hate/marginalize me simply because I am a gay American who doesn’t believe in Abraham’s God. Even so, the differences between left and right are so stark at this point in history that I feel as if I have been conditioned to react to scenes of Republicans gathered en masse, praying and waving flags and preaching about conservative social values.

More importantly, the people who take pride in praying the another hurricane would drown New Orleans earlier this week (because the city was hosting the same gay mega-event that Katrina halted), those crackpots are just as much a part of the American story as the crazy Lefties who would have the government legalize all drugs, eliminate the drinking age and outlaw the military.

I struggle to find the middle path, plain and simple. I rationalize the way I feel by asking myself about the following scenario: what if today’s Democrats were the polar opposite of today’s Republicans? How different would the Democratic Party’s convention have been last week? It’s hard to imagine – so hard, I think, because the majority of America’s liberals aren’t speaking from the far fringes. There is no mainstream discussion in liberal circles of a nationwide gun ban, or realistic talk of legalizing all drugs, or of the government forcibly nationalizing ExxonMobil, though you do hear conservatives openly talk of an amendment to the Constitution banning marriage equality while promoting Christianity as a quasi-sanctioned state religion and providing unfair tax benefits that keep the rich wealthy while the poor continue to slide backward.

See how easy that was to rationalize? Insanely easy, I think.

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With a tropical storm pummeling Washington, I drove a friend to work this afternoon, and on the way back home, I took New Hampshire Avenue through Dupont Circle. There was very little traffic on the roads, and while the sky above was gray and heavy with rain, the tree-lined streets were completely placid.

Slowly driving through this, one of the older parts of the city, I came to appreciate how small our world has become. Embassies of African and South Pacific nations line New Hampshire Avenue in Victorian rowhouses; at the same time, a CD of the Dhol Foundation’s combination of traditional Punjabi and Irish folk music played on the stereo.

Twenty years ago, I would have never know about music like that of Prem Joshua, Choying Drolma, Angelique Kidjo or Ubud Dua. Place names like Eritrea, Wat Oudong, Tibet and Hvalfjörður were completely foreign. Splitting my time as a child between a farm and the nearby small town, I had no idea about qi, shirshasana or Chenrezig. And yet, in 2008, all of these things have made me who I am today.

I used to lament the lack of opportunity I had in that small Southern town. I never heard of the Peace Corps or archeology or applied linguistics. The world of Indiana Jones was one of complete fantasy; Washington, D.C. seemed light years away from the fields of my grandparents’ farm, and the classrooms of my middle and high school were a place where I struggled to understand myself, not the world around me.

But today, with a passport full of immigration stamps and visas – and a mind full of ideas planted by reading, studying, traveling, meeting people and expanding my horizons – I have come to appreciate the haven offered by the world’s former lack of connectedness. How many times have I wanted to pick up and move to somewhere like the Caribbean or Southeast Asia – or even back to a small town – in search of a simpler life? There are days when the caves of the Himalayan hermit monks sound incredibly appealing, especially in a world where an act of oppression, violence or hate can reach billions of people in the time it takes a byte of data to fly across the Internet.

I am hardly alone in longing for a slower pace, but humanity’s story is best told against a backdrop of planetary scale. We are, I believe, curious by nature, and most of us will seek to learn more about the world when given an opportunity. I never had the chance to see anything beyond a worn set of encyclopedias that my dad brought home when he worked as a traveling salesman for World Book until I was in my mid-20s; since then, I have felt a subconscious drive to try and catch up, formally studying linguistics and world religions in an effort to be the best-possible global citizen.

Global citizenry comes with a steep price: with the irrelevancy of world borders and the “merging” of societies resulting from the West’s broadcast of its finest cultural wares to the rest of the planet, there is no longer such a thing as an untouched culture, which is an inevitable and unfortunate fact of life in the 21st century.

But are we better off? China is now the world’s second most-obese nation, thanks in large part to the proliferation of Kentucky Fried Chicken and other fast-food restaurants in the farthest rural areas of that nation; languages are becoming extinct as the shift to an urban-focused life leaves millennia-old communities of people in ruins. And the global economy, built upon the notion of an ever-expanding GDP that is quickly outpacing the planet’s and mankind’s ability to keep up, is pushing us to a point where our Earth will be uninhabitable. Geez, who wouldn’t long for the simple life in a small town or isolated village?

The flip side of all of this is that we have an opportunity to reach new heights as a collective humanity. If half the propaganda put out by the Chinese during the Olympics were true – if ‘One World One Dream’ could be a reality in some way – we could work together to solve crises like HIV/AIDS, global warming and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Working in concert, we could reach the pinnacle of our shared human potential.

So: small world, big problems or big world, small problems, it’s all a wash. We are where we are today, and the same holds true for me. I’m not sure where the solutions lie, or if there even are any, given the way things have worked over these last 20 years.

The only thing I can say for sure is that we are sitting on the opportunity of a lifetime – of thousands of lifetimes – to create a better world. Though when I stop to really think about it, I have that opportunity each morning I wake up and start my day. If enough of us seize that very real individual opportunity – in small towns and big cities, on small islands and across the seven continents – then maybe we can reach a tipping point. Maybe, just maybe.

I watch the news each night in bewilderment. A political candidate goes around essentially telling lies, portions of his campaign rhetoric debunked a hundred times over by the media, which only makes the candidate’s supporters even more certain of his credibility. On the other side, the one who said this campaign would be different is stooping nearly as low as his competitor; he has no choice, everyone reasons. Very little is fair in politics.

How is one to take a mindful approach to politics when so much seems to be on the line? I am tempted to sit here and tick off the reasons why I am sad, angry, disturbed and confused about what I see coming from the Republicans: are they really still using the “Bridge to Nowhere” in stump speeches? Do hard-hit factory workers in the Midwest actually give credence to awkward, populist messages from a man who owns so many houses he can’t keep track of them?

And what about Democrats? The “White Privilege” message circulating the Internet isn’t doing much to heal the partisan and racial rifts that are holding our nation back in a world that is more than happy to leave us behind.

Everything I felt on the night Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech – the optimism for the next four years and beyond that could have redefined Generation X – has been vaporized by the unending stream of rancor being let on the American people.

Those soaring feelings of hope have been replaced in a mind hardening for combat. I find myself reading dissections of Sarah Palin’s background, mentally cheering as pundits tear apart her pronounced readiness for the White House (“You can never blink, Charlie…it’s all God’s will, don’t ‘cha know?”). This woman has raised a huge family on the American Frontier and still found time to achieve a political status few women will ever know; what on Earth am I cheering for?

I don’t like being made to feel this way. It was, perhaps, naïve to walk away from Obama’s acceptance speech thinking that this campaign would be different, but that sense is what motivated to support him from the very beginning.

I am not naïve enough, however, to feel betrayed. This is simply the reality of national politics in America, which is the biggest let down of all.

Come back in four years. If we haven’t managed to melt the entire planet (or its financial markets), I’ll listen, just don’t expect me to open my wallet or my heart so quickly next time around.

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As the world faces a crisis so large that some economists predict it may eclipse the Great Depression and cause a financial collapse that makes 1929 look like a mild downturn, I have mostly avoided letting my mind wander into “what ifs” and have instead asked myself “why?” Is this current situation to be expected – even anticipated – in a global system that demands ever-increasing GDPs, despite the finite resources we have to produce commercial activity in a wickedly upward spiral?

I certainly don’t count myself as a historian, but it seems as though mankind has always lived in societies where status is afforded to those with means, often at the expense of those without. While the system, which I am left to conclude is almost as basic a part of our human nature as is our most fundamental forms of attachment, may have worked 50 or 100 years ago, we are now simply running out of planet and can no longer afford to collectively treat each other as a means to an end.

Throughout time, there have been incredibly wise people who have recognized that the solution to our problems lie in a mutual recognition of the interconnectedness that, for better or for worse, binds us together. It is only through actions that are informed by this view (referred to as “taking whole” in the writings attributed to the Chinese military strategist Sūn Zǐ) that we can begin to bridge the gaps spanning humanity and cooperatively work to solve our shared problems.

Among those wise men and women were Martin Luther King, Jr., who I am gradually becoming to view as a Buddhist thinker. In this month’s Shambhala Sun, Diana Calthorpe Rose of the Garrison Institute recalled MLK’s visionary, almost prophetic words from his final sermon:

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood… We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

The “whys” of the current economic situation ran through my mind today as some 20,000 people literally showed up on my work’s doorstep for a citywide job fair. For hours, lines snaked through and around the building as people from all walks of life waited for the opportunity to fill out a basic job application. Some of the people in the crowds seemed utterly defeated, others anxious or optimistic.

It occurred to me that, as Rev. King put it, our success as a society is as much on the shoulders of the wealthy lobbyists and lawyers on K Street – and paper pushers like me – as it is on the poorest and most destitute among us. What has yet to happen, I think, is a wholesale recognition of this fact in the large parts of our society where ambition is driven by raw greed.

When the wealthy Wall Street CEO crashes his mega-billion-dollar company into the ground, does he ever stop to reflect on what that severance check for $135 million would mean to the people whose money he lost? Better yet, what would it mean to those who have never had a chance to save money because they live hand-to-mouth, week after week?

I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. Powerful words that may yet start a global revolution in the distant future.

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