Kevin Lankes

Have you ever spiraled? Had one thought or external trigger take you down a staircase into a deep darkness where all of your flaws and vulnerabilities were on clear display? And this walk down the stairs into oblivion was repeated over and over again? Of course you have. We all have. Spiraling is a common coping mechanism used in response to what's known as negative automatic thoughts (NATs). When I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 25, I had a sizable number of negative thoughts.

I have fifteen years of experience creating media in print and on the web, and I know exactly why America is so incredibly polarized right now. In fact, there’s one particular thing we can point to with clarity that’s more responsible for radical political partisanship and violent political rhetoric and action in America. We’re going to talk about that one thing here today.

So we all know there’s this practice of drawing voting districts in like, Rorschach Test shapes, and we know this is done so that one particular political party can win more seats in Congress. In the 2024 election, just 9% of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives were considered competitive. The rest were safe, firmly belonging to one party or the other. Why are just okay with this?