Unstrange Bedfollows

 I have often said the following:

You only hear what you want to hear, you only see what you want to see, and you only believe what you want to believe.

On occasion, that gets reinforced by studies. I recently read of one which supports this, though it was more concerned with the conflict than the amity. The division we see more than the cohesiveness we want to feel. Two sides of the same coin, if you ask me.

It is the nature of humans to want to reduce strife in their personal lives. Stress is difficult to live with and studies show that also. The study shows:

Research shows: More and more residential neighborhoods are politically homogenous.

It appears we use political strife as a factor in choosing where we live. Like schools of brightly colored fish, we swim in the same political direction in many ways. But how do we do this? Create like-minded neighborhoods, that is. I think in much the same way we create racially homogenous ones. We do not simply fall in love with a house, we apparently seek out neighborhoods where we expect to live comfortably and peaceably with our neighbors. We do this in a number of ways: we seek the advice (or just heed it) when we begin to think about moving. We consider the demographics of potential neighborhoods and one of the factors seems to be a political like-mindedness.

It's human nature to want to fit in. In spite of all the stories we heard as children that tried to teach us to accept our uniqueness and our rebellious teenage years where we dressed and behaved like our peers while professing our individualism, we really want to just "get along."

Don't you agree?