The Imaginary Debate (my op-ed in the Advocate)

The Imaginary Debate

Actor and blogger Chad Lindsey asks, if the secular and devout can comfortably share space at a drive-in theater in Michigan, why can’t the political right share lower Manhattan?

By Chad Lindsey

COMMENTARY: My parents taught me to share. They also taught me to work for a living and to mind my own business. I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of Americans are taught some version of these basics, but I’m beginning to think that most of us are losing sight of them as we reach adulthood in this, the Century of Emboldened Stupidity.

Summer 1989: On any given gray and humid early Sunday morning, my best friend Kent would aim his car toward the gravel entrance of the old drive-in theater. As the sky in the east just began to bleed with the colors of a ripe nectarine, he and I would pass through the empty ticket booths and wind along the driveway into the broad lot facing the tall dirty-white plywood screen, looming above the quickly warming scene.