Like millions of my compatriots, I live with a foot in both Americas. I spend weekdays in the permissive, risque, liberal hub of New York City. On weekends I commune with a deliberately obscure upstate country village I’ll call Bluestone, in one of America’s most right-wing territories. Straddling red and blue zones can be mind opening. It helps make sense of otherwise incomprehensible differences of opinion. For example, in cities where people live as close together as boxed chocolates, guns will always cause more problems than they solve. But up around Bluestone, where towns are far-flung, roads are rough and it takes police 40 minutes to respond to an emergency call, you don’t have to be a gun nut to want a rifle or pistol in case some errant Rottweiler lunges at your kid or a rabid skunk goes after your houseguests. You understand why it’s futile for reds and blues to debate gun laws. The issue isn’t competing ideologies but conflicting realities.

Ecology presents another experiential disconnect. As a Manhattanite, every environmental regulation sounds good to me. Up in Bluestone? Not. When my neighbor complains that the government won’t let him drain a puddle on his riverside property, and that to challenge this whimsical judgment costs more than he can afford, I see how overly broad or badly administered laws designed to protect endangered wetlands can be a plague on small landowners. Living inside of both colors, you understand how self-interest blurs ideology. Upstate conservatives denounce redistributive taxes, in theory, while in practice they lobby to sluice city tax revenue into rural programs. New York City folk who deplore Bush’s evisceration of the Clean Air Act grew suddenly fond of airborne carcinogens the minute their mayor banned indoor smoking in public spaces.

Thanks to such paradoxes, our society isn’t split so much as marbleized. A rural doctor who swings red on tort law might think blue on reproductive rights. A libertarian red on taxes may glow blue on marijuana laws. Few towns are homogenous. Superficially, Bluestoners appear eager to ban abortion. Lawn signs call for this, as do most letters in local newspapers. Yet when polled, we split 50-50. Similarly, while New York City spawns demonstrations against the White House’s foreign policy, it is speckled with quiet enclaves whose inhabitants believe that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq will lead to a safer, more just and stable world.

All told, the newscasters’ duotone map is a gross deception–and counterproductive, too. Overgeneralizing our differences makes it harder for Americans to listen to one another’s concerns, respect the reality of one another’s needs and laugh at our own hypocrisies. Because a healthy democracy depends on us doing all three, I’d like to demand that color coding be outlawed. Only I can’t. I’m too blue to support political censorship and too red to meddle with the right of privately owned media to sell us whatever idiocy we’ll buy.