There's always been division and polarization in US politics, but I'm not sure if there's been a time since the Civil War when the country has been so evenly divided. Most of the coverage of current politics seems to focus on the politicians and the "chattering classes", but not what's going on in the lives of average Americans.
Recently, author and journalist Ian Brown spent two weeks riding a Greyhound bus across the US from Los Angeles to New York followed by Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson. He writes about the trip and the people he encountered in this long article in the Globe and Mail.
“On a plane, you have first-class and economy,” a rider would say to me on the first day of the trip. “On a bus, you have no idea who’s on there with you.”
The bus is also the last truly democratic way to get from here to there, at a time when a critical slice of Americans can’t decide which road to take. There were 168 million registered American voters in the last presidential election. Polls suggest they are deadlocked between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The election will be decided by an estimated three million undecided voters in swing states – among them Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all places I plan to debus for a glance around before I reach New York City. (Georgia and North Carolina are also swing states, but I have only two weeks, so they’re off the itinerary.)
All of which is to explain why, on a Saturday in late summer, I was standing in the doorway of a four-person tent pitched on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row, a short walk from my hotel and the nearby Greyhound station.
It's a brilliant, sharp piece of writing coupled with memorable photos and I strongly encourage you to take the time to read it. (It's a gift link from my subscription, so no paywall. Articles like this are why I subscribe to the Globe and a few other newspapers).
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