Divisions. Divisions. Divisions. Divisions.

They’re everywhere and they’re deeper than ever.

Such are the times.

It was like this when the civil rights movement reached fever pitch in the 1960s.In and around that same time frame Cubans experienced similar divisions as they debated the disparity between rich and poor then after Castro toppled Batista, started a new debate about whether Castro wasn’t what the country needed after all (and Ed Sullivan welcomed him onto his live television stage as Americans cheered). Not long after that, the Cuban missile crisis had the entire nation biting its nails about the prospective annihilation of the entire human species because that same man applauded on American live television had made a home for Soviet nukes in the Western hemisphere aimed at the entire U.S. Eastern Seaboard.

In all these cases of deep division, which eventually extended to the Vietnam War, to the emergence of rock music, long hair, LSD and pot smoking, to the availability of birth control, and a hundred other things, what eventually became apparent was that debate and discussion lost their usefulness. The divisions were too deep. Opposing sides had become too entrenched. Persuasive arguments no longer mattered.Nobody making those arguments was listening to anyone else’s arguments. Only the divisions, not understanding or compromise grew.

This kind of division dynamic can happen in loud and boisterous and dramatic environments like the ones above, or it can happen in subtler and more treacherous environments too. And for their lack of visibility, the latter may be worse. Like the black ice, we don’t see until the car we’re driving slides off the bridge. It all depends on your vantage point. What you see, that is. And if you’re standing in the spot from which visibility of something is occluded, you’re not going to see it until that occlusion is removed, no matter how eloquent the argument, how bright the light.

In reviewing Sofia Coppola’s wonderful film about the times leading up to the French Revolution with Kirstin Dunst portraying Marie Antoinette, this was the one point that got across. She was the focus of hate to be sure, but it doesn’t take much sympathy to realize that she wasn’t deliberately trying to cause suffering among the French people. She was totally unaware of that suffering. The song “Girls Just WannaHave Fun” comes to mind. Indeed, in the waning moments of that film, she becomes aware of the masses gathered in the front yard of Versailles and comes to the window to observe the sea of lighted torches with a look on her face as if to say “Why are they so upset? I want to understand. How can we help?” Not a scintilla of  “What did we do wrong? ”When somebody told her about the bread riots, and she responded with “Let them eat cake,” it wasn’t a put-down. She really didn’t have a clue.

The divisions were so deep that debate didn’t and wouldn’t have mattered. The vision was too fundamentally occluded by the embedded point of view. But the learning experience by which Me. Antoinette was to travel from total ignorance to fully informed at light speed was but moments away, delivered in the form of a sharp blade traveling towards the nape of her neck at 9.8m/sec².

The problem, of course, was that as effective as this learning technique may have been, at the exact moment the lesson was at last learned, the capacity to make use of the newfound knowledge was, alas, simultaneously rendered moot.