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So a woman wrote an op-ed in which she essentially tries out different coping strategies for dealing with the cognitive dissonance that her Trump-voting neighbours shovelled her driveway without her asking (aka they 'brought out the big guns' of 'kindness')
She wants this to be about some kind of high-falutin' 'ethical question' about 'what it means' and what in particularly it 'obliges' her to do in response
This isn't the real dilemma for her, however. The real dilemma is that no matter her attempts to 're-interpret' the situation according to its 'significance' within the culture war, the simple kindness of the gesture remains, unavoidable and inconvenient
Something has shifted- she's found herself on uncomfortable terrain- it didn't occur to her that ppl actually 'did' things like this. Not only does it humanise her neighbours- it suggests a moral sensibility scaled down to the sphere of action available in everyday life
What confuses her about her shovelled driveway is that it seems entirely outside the realm of 'politics' altogether, because for her 'politics' is entirely symbolic- even its material questions are mediated to her by the 'symbolism' of her support
She is trying to find ways to make the shovelled driveway a 'symbol' because it is the only means of valuation she has- she is alienated for simple, neighbourly acts as if they're a foreign language. Ironically, she is ideologically snowblind
Looming behind her confusion is the dawning awareness that another system of valuation exists- one connected to the immediate and mundane world of small acts of kindness shown strangers out of principle, and that in this system, she is not only lost, but deficient
You can see her here trying to find the right 'lens'- but in the Eddie Murphy bit, the social cleavage is between black and white, not rural and metropolitan. She has a moment of 'forgetting', in which Murphy's experiences and her own become identified
