I'm told it is sometimes helpful to project outside yourself, to mess with your own ideological boundaries, to attempt, however exasperatingly and however much it makes you want to hose yourself down with the cool fire of intellectual clarity afterwards, to enter the minds of your enemies, or those with whom you merely disagree, or -- perhaps most challenging of all -- with those whose mental gyrations you simply cannot fathom in the slightest.
Behold, the Undecideds. Have you heard of this bizarre, nefarious group? The millions of faceless, slow-blinking, mentally unattached Americans who are, right this minute, with mere days to go before the most historic election in our lifetime and when faced with what seems to be the most glaringly obvious divisions of attitude and perspective you could possibly imagine, still "on the fence" about Obama or McCain, love or hate, country or disco, Paris or Fresno, oil or water, Porsche or Pinto?
Do you know anyone from this group? Those who have the uncanny ability to stare straight at the biggest issues and most momentous decisions of their very lives, and shrug?
Odds are very good you do. Because they are, apparently, legion. And pivotal. And they are, it must be said, one of the most baffling groups in world history. Impenetrable. Unnerving. As such, it is perhaps a worthy experiment to try to enter the Undecided mind, to examine what might be going on -- or, as the case may be, not going on.
What we risk: instant madness, increased frustration, screaming. What we stand to gain: perspective, empathy, more screaming. Shall we?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/10/22/notes102208.DTL
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