With all respect to @springsteen, this is a bizarre and frankly disturbing ad that suggests that the path to "common ground" is entirely on white space and the assuaging of white anxiety. Really?
Bruce Springsteen
 @springsteen
8 Feb 2021
The Middle.
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I’ve been to that chapel several times. I’ve driven down countless boarded up Main streets in Kansas & Nebraska to get there. Look beyond @springsteen to @Sarah_Smarsh’s excellent memoir of growing up poor in Kansas, “Heartland”: nytimes.com/2018/09/10/books…

She Grew Up Poor on a Kansas Farm. Her Memoir Is an Attempt to Understand Why. (Published 2018)

In “Heartland,” Sarah Smarsh offers a cleareyed account of hardscrabble life on the Great Plains — a pattern that in her family goes back generations.

nytimes.com
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Replying to @gjdarr @springsteen @Sarah_Smarsh
No doubt the ad speaks to the anxieties and sufferings of people on those Main streets in Kansas and Nebraska. But what does it mean to meet "in the middle" by implying that those are the only or the critical anxieties facing our country?

Feb 8, 2021 · 5:04 PM UTC

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Replying to @RobertEllsberg @Sarah_Smarsh
Don’t know that the ad implies strongly that these are the “only” anxieties our country faces but the anxieties are “critical” in these communities to be sure. No fan of the ad myself - @springsteen used Kansas as a prop; he steered for a “middle” in his Jeep that ain’t there.
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Ok. My default is to give @springsteen the benefit of a doubt. Jeep, maybe not so much.
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