GROW THE POSSIBLE BIGGER:

A zero sum reality, in which every win is someone else's loss, exists in a constant state of crisis, and those who want to push back end up having no language other than the language of crisis to use, pitting one kind of existential threat against another. Immigration is a case in point: It threatens our sense of having limited, and dwindling, resources and space. This sense of crisis in turn justifies any means to contain immigration, with the principle being, as the president said recently, "I'm sorry, you can't come in." Sure, you have to separate families now, but that's the price of doing business.

Challenges to this position can either accept the essential terms ("yes, this is an existential threat, or at any rate feels like one") but try to implement the solutions more humanely ("#JailFamiliesTogether"). Or they will escalate the level on which the crisis occurs, making the creation of a border crisis a move in a larger, national crisis. Invoking crisis tries to draw attention to the ways in which our political reality is artificial, and can be changed, but only by representing that as an existential threat.

But because every crisis is existential, life-or-death, the capacity for political attention shrinks to just one struggle. And indeed, many of these issues are life or death, but not for the main players, for whom the struggle often about capturing attention and setting the rules. Whenever an issue is exhausted, or some minor victory is achieved, the next crisis starts.

The above is mostly an attempt to articulate--albeit in an abstract way--something that's nagging at me as I watch one political battle after another take place. I take most of the issues at stake here quite seriously; I don't believe it's a waste of time to dedicate attention, money, or thought to them. I don't decry the idea of politicization or polarization as such--it all depends, after all, on what the politics are, where the poles sit.

But what I resent about "reality," and the constant crisis generated thereby, is its foreclosing of imaginative possibility.

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