It's become popular these days to compare to the current political split in the country to cultural splits of years past--more than one wag has opined that the 2010s might well become the new 1960s.

Maybe. But while there are many similarities, there are differences. Most conservative commentators point to the civil rights movement and the Great Society programs (specifically Medicare, Medicaid and a variety of welfare initiatives) as the forefront of the ideological splits of that decade.

In addition, the generation gap showed up most importantly with such issues as the Vietnam War and the "war on drugs."

None of those issues have been resolved in any significant way. While it is largely legal (or mostly legal) to smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home, we're still spending billions to fight the inflow of illegal drugs to this country. We still don't agree on the causes or the meaning of the Vietnam War. And more than a few new members of Congress would like nothing less than to shut down Medicare and Medicaid, even though these same legislators routinely whip up anger against last year's health care law by claiming that those programs will be cut by the new regulations.

The real difference between 1965 and 2011, however, isn't ideological. We've heard all these arguments before. The difference is how our differences are reflected. It turns out that we vote with our feet.

This, too, is hardly news. The real political differences between us are reflected by where we live. Folks who live in cities or close-in suburbs tend to be more liberal. Folks who live in exurbs, small towns or "the countryside" (as my sons like to say) tend to be more conservative. There are some interesting nodes within each "side," as those in rural America are more libertarian and less socially conservative (though still quite religious), and those in the exurbs tend to swing the other way. Folks in cities are much more likely to be advocates of school choice, while the close-in suburbanites are generally hardcore public school advocates.

The designs of our nation's metropoli, however, means that the divides are almost invisible to most. Folks in the exurbs could well believe that no white people voted for Obama, and folks in the center of cities might well see their far-flung neighbors as religious zealots.

By and large, though, most Americans aren't zealtots, bigots or traitors. Most of us are normal folks who happen to see things through different lenses. Which is completely understandable. After all, people in cities need different things from their government and social institutions than folks in the countryside might need.

Not only that, people in different places can see the same event or person in radically different ways. John Brown is a hero in Lawrence, Kan. Without his violent support of free state settlers in Kansas, it's possible that Lawrence could have been wiped off the map in the years before the Civil War. We learned a lot about John Brown the abolitionist hero in Lawrence's elementary schools--and not much about Harper's Ferry. But this example ought to illustrate how one person's traitor can be another's hero, with geography as the determinant.

There aren't a lot of places where people of different backgrounds routinely come across each other. But one is the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Americans of all colors, shapes and backgrounds show up every day to take in the monuments, the museums, the Capitol and the White House. Plenty of folks from outside the U.S. take in the Mall and its surroundings as well. I've been down there dozens of times since moving inside the Beltway five years ago this week, and I've always marveled at the wide variety of people meandering the wide fields.

Every once in a while, I've found myself in a conversation with someone from out of town. I'm not sure why, but most tourists are able to tag me as a local, and I'm often asked for directions. Sometimes we get into short conversations. And while I'm aware that many of these folks are on the "other side" of the political divide, I'm always struck more by our similarities than our differences.

The Mall is sometimes known as our nation's living room. This is most apparent when once of the major festivals sprouts up--the Folklife Festival in late June and early July, the National Book Festival in September or last October's USA Science and Engineering Fesitval. Walking among hordes of my fellow citizens has always brought me a feeling of comfort. Yeah, we can disagree on almost everything, but we tend to get along. And we're not especially two-faced about it.

More of our metropoli need a space like the Mall (or Central Park), somewhere that we can all get together from time to time and simply appreciate the great luck we all enjoy by the mere fact of our American citizenship.

We live in a great country. And if we all got together more in a physical sense, I think we might well get together in a political sense as well. And even if that isn't true, the occasional reminder that our little corner of the universe isn't an island never hurts.

Jon Worley lives in the Berkeley of the East Coast. Before moving there, he lived in the other Berkeley of the East Coast.