Our ideological split is starting to harm us as a people. It came into view into view in four major areas this past week involving issues of health, safety, and property, both locally and nationally.

The idea that much of our region's economy is and has been tourism-based, or at least tied intrinsically to whatever happens downstate from us, got full play in Rochester last Thursday when people came out with battling ideas about short term rentals and the new tourism economy. On the one hand were old ideas, based on nothing but fears with no supporting research, that short term rentals had to do with "transients" and was basically undesirable. Forget the fact that Airbnb and its sister entities in the shared economy work based on review systems that regulate hosts and guests equally. Or the reality that more young people want to stay in this fashion than in major motel chains these days, let alone the detail that such rentals bring people closer into a community, allowing them to spend more of their money locally, than what happens to those staying in resorts.

Proposed laws got stalled for now, so more research can now be done. BUT... an ideological rift still exists behind the local phenomenon that went unspoken last Thursday in Accord. That's the fact that despite the fact that Airbnb works with other counties across the state and nation to bring them bed tax revenues, Ulster hasn't done anything along such lines yet because our legislature chairman doesn't believe such things are legal. He's been saying for over a year now that he wants an okay from the GOP-controlled state senate before moving forward here with what works elsewhere.

Next up, let's consider the nation's opioid crisis, which we've written about in these pages regularly for years now. Our president held a news conference about it this week and despite the urgings of a bipartisan committee he put together to study the issue, refused to call the situation an emergency. Worse still, he and his administration then trotted out old maxims about how the way to stop addiction is to counter it young, even though our medical community has long discounted the efficacy of than old "Just Say No" campaigns of 30 plus years ago. They're talking about greater criminal prosecutions, as if this didn't have to do with health and was all about putting more folks in prison, the better to not have to daily face our problems. Didn't anyone tell these people these problems are worse in certain parts of the nation where "base" has become the operative word since last November?

Of course, this ideological rift sits atop a deeper one involving overall attitudes about mental health, which came to the fore during last week's sentencing of Sarra Gilbert for the murder of her mother in Ellenville a year ago. The young woman's defense pointed out her years suffering abuse, clear indications of a long history involving mental health problems... while the prosecution said Gilbert was hiding drug addiction behind a shield of mental illness. Say what? As if addiction itself weren't a mental health issue? Once again, our nation's great will to instill ethics through punishment trumped any concern or compassion for the ways in which mental health IS health. Just as our front lines for community mental health issues tend to fall to our police, so Ms. Gilbert will now be pushed towards solitary confinement instead of any attempt to help her.

Why help people who have hurt? That is not who we are now.

Which brings us to a final issue involving ideological rifts: the fact of that multi-agency report on the growing effects of climate change on our nation that our government's produced, as scheduled by our Congress to take place every four years. How will that be received by an administration that's meanwhile settuing up a means to question all scientific research, as if all were partisan and suspect?

We're coming to close to the start of another academic year and hope that we can all start looking, again, to find ways to reach consensus about some things, and move beyond allowing our dogma to rule so many aspects of our lives. Why? It may be killing us, or at the least making us ever sicker.