Red. Blue. These colors are indelibly burned into our popular unconsciousness. They’ve become our war paint. They’ve become the gang colors of a tribalized America.

Now take a step back from our petty playground quarrels and look up at the universe.
Red and Blue have played a timeless role in how we see things on a truly cosmic level. Astronomers observe celestial bodies in deep space. And they will tell you that these objects are either “Red Shifting” or “Blue Shifting”.

When an object moves away from us, the light is shifted to the red end of the spectrum, as its wavelengths get longer. If an object moves closer, the light moves to the blue end of the spectrum, as its wavelengths get shorter. So, if a galaxy, or cluster of galaxies, is hurtling away from us, it will appear red. And if a planet or star is moving towards us, it will appear blue.

Now, back to our earthly playground squabble. Opinion generators, emotion factories and conspiracy mills, all lubed up and hyper-accelerated by social media, have cleaved our nation in two, with both sides glowering angrily at each other from across an ever-expanding abyss. If left unchecked, civilization itself will split into schizophrenic realities, who each believe they carry the holy scepter of truth.

And that's not all: The faster an object moves away from another object, the redder its shift will appear. And eventually, if we shift far enough apart, we will only see the ghost light emanating from our long-dead selves, like some long vanished primeval galaxy, 20 billion light years away.

But there’s a flip side to this cosmic dance. If we all manage to smash our smoke-filled echo chambers, we might still have time to see the objective truths that bind us all. And we might begin to drift back towards each other. We will start to blue-shift.

So is America Red Shifting? Or Blue Shifting? History can’t be viewed from within itself. Maybe some astronomer is watching us through a telescope in the distant future. We’ll have to wait for the answer.