Emmanuel Mugatyawe, 36, sits on the ground as a friend fills out his yellow admissions form. He has been waiting two months for an operation to repair a broken leg – now infected – that he sustained when a car plowed into his motorbike.

 

“These are not routine cases; there are very few fresh injuries,” says Shashank Karvekar, an orthopedic surgeon and member of the Rotary Club of Solapur, India, after he and his Rwandan colleague Joel Bikoroti examine several dozen patients, scheduling many for surgery. Over the next eight days, a team of 18 specialized doctors (12 of whom are Rotarians) will perform surgeries on 268 Rwandan patients, including procedures in orthopedics and urology. The trip, initiated by District 3080 (India) and hosted by District 9150 (Central Africa), is funded by The Rotary Foundation with support from the Rwandan government. It’s the fourth medical mission to Rwanda that the two districts have organized since 2012. This time, among the volunteers is K.R. Ravindran, the first sitting RI president to take part in the mission.

 

A few buildings down on the University Central Hospital’s campus (referred to as CHUK), Rajendra Saboo, 1991-92 Rotary International president, is busy coordinating the last-minute logistics of the mission. The 82-year-old from Chandigarh, India, has done this many times. After finishing a post-presidential term on the Board of Trustees, Saboo and his wife, Usha, began to look for ways to participate in the type of hands-on service they had long encouraged of their fellow Rotarians.

Abramowitz and Webster do note that an increasing number of voters identify themselves as independents – Gallup put the number at 43 percent last year – which would suggest a decline in partisanship. Unfortunately, actual voting data reveal that these folks are choosing to label themselves as “independent” to avoid the perception of mindless loyalty to a particular party. In fact, they almost never cross party lines. The “swing voter” is a dying species in American politics.

 

Bill Bishop’s 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, chronicles the larger cultural shifts that have stoked this polarization. His basic point is that Americans increasingly self-segregate. We surround ourselves with people of the same class, level of education, and ideology. Forget red and blue states, we’re talking about red and blue neighborhoods.

 

At the same time, our very definition of “politics” has changed over the past half-century. We used to consider politics a collective civic endeavor, the means by which our society sought to solve common crises. These days, politics functions as a form of identity. We regard those in the other tribe not as neighbors who share many of our basic goals and values but as an abstract set of strangers who seek to desecrate all we hold dear.

Here is a summary of this year’s World Polio Day event, by the numbers: