<em>"Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."
</em><strong>-- CONAN O'BRIEN, January 22, 2010</strong><em> </em>

That has got to be the damnedest quote I've ever seen, particularly in the circumstances under which it was delivered.

It certainly doesn't fit in with the mood of the country today, where America is as badly divided as I have seen it in my lifetime. There are times these days when I really do feel as if we are living in two countries, one which seems open to the future and one that seems desperate to return to the past.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/america_divided1.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-255" title="america_divided1" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/america_divided1.jpg" alt="" width="298" height="282" /></a>The opening speech at this weekend's Tea Party convention in Nashville, by former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., showed just how divided we are.

Tancredo decried multiculturalism and said basically that the only reason Barack Obama had been elected president was that voters didn't have to pass a civics test before casting their vote.

The Tea Partiers banned the local newspaper, <em>The Tennessean</em>, from covering the convention because of so-called "liberal bias," but the international media was all over the story, with the <em>London Times</em> reporting on Tancredo's vicious speech.

There's a lot of anger -- a lot of hate -- out there these days, which is what makes O'Brien's beautiful statement on his last night as host of the Tonight Show all the more poignant.

One would think if anyone had a right to be angry these days, it would be O'Brien, whose tenure in the job he always wanted lasted only seven months. But in a world where TV shows are cancelled after only one or two episodes these days, maybe seven months is a long time.

My guess is Conan didn't play too well in Tea Party America, but we already know David Letterman isn't one of their favorites after his run-in with Sarah Palin.

I just wonder sometimes if we really are one country anymore.

I've lived in a so-called "blue state" for the last 20 years, and the chances are very good that I will be moving to a state that has voted for a Democrat for president only once since 1964.

The irony is that the part of Virginia in which I grew up has become reasonably liberal -- or at least moderate -- and of course there are parts of California that are as red as the reddest conservative state.

I still think that working people are pretty much the same everywhere, but that we have been turned against each other by powerful people with selfish agendas. In a country where the top 1 percent make as much money between them as the bottom 50 percent, it's in their interests to keep that bottom 50 percent from figuring out how much power they actually have.

I think if they ever do figure it out, we might be able to save our country.

Otherwise we're just on the way to becoming another oligarchy.