A quick lesson on political realities

The major political ideologies in America are often presented as stark opposites that hold opposite views on most issues and only overlap in superficial, no-brainer ways.

That's extremely short-sighted and wrong, and the Boko Haram abductions in Nigeria illustrate just how wrong that view is. These are Islamic fundamentalists who violently kidnapped 100 schoolgirls as part of an ongoing campaign to end the formal education of women. They don't want women to go to school, and they are willing to kill to make that happen.

I'm sure you could find a couple lunatics in America that will believe any crazy view, but for all intents and purposes, no one in America agrees with this view. The same can be said for all kinds of older opinions that our society has burned away over the course of civilization. Think of slavery, genocide, formal stratification of society into castes and torture as a form amusement.

Those ideas were accepted as the norm for a long time, and as the savage actions of Boko Haram are showing us now, there are plenty of people in other parts of the world who still reject ideas that we consider beyond debate.