Not to mention the fact that I don’t like some of the terms that I suspect refer to me–terms like avocado-toast-eater, snowflake and latte liberal.

As Jon Kelly wrote for BBC News Magazine, “In the tribal discourse of U.S. politics, the espresso with steamed milk is identified squarely with one side. It is the warm beverage of progressivism … that proverbial subset of affluent, coastal-dwelling, Prius-driving intellectuals … Republicans, presumably, prefer filter.”

Emily Heil, in a Washington Post article, wrote that avocado toast “has become all but synonymous with millennials… as the reason they can’t afford to buy homes today (never mind bigger factors like rising prices and stagnating wages). But it’s pretty much gone mainstream now (OK, boomer?)”

In the 1860s, in Missouri, a snowflake was someone who was pro-slavery, against abolition. In the 1970s, a snowflake was a white person or a Black person who acted white. Now the term snowflake is used to refer to an overly sensitive liberal–what used to be known as a bleeding heart-or else to a millennial.

Also, speaking of diversity, I have just learned that I am cisgender. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, right? (Cis and trans are terms used in chemistry, I looked it up.) Our prehistoric ancestors were even more diverse than we are today, apparently, and I wish I could know what the various wandering tribes thought of each other when they met up.

I imagine they looked at each other with fear and loathing and, if they had language, called each other names and, among their own kind, referred to other groups with horrible, scathing epithets. Naturally, that didn’t prevent them from having sex with one another. They were only human.

I have always been fascinated by these prehistoric ancestors, the various hominids who came together, presumably in caves, in Africa, out of Africa and around the world, to produce the human race as we know it today.

All right, as I go Googling around the internet in search of scholarly articles about our prehistoric ancestors, I got sidetracked by the following headline from Inverse, an online magazine.

“Death orgy: 45 million years later, a paleontologist realizes fossil frogs died having sex.”

This is just one of the distractions we columnists must deal with. But never mind that right now.

As I mentioned in this column last week, not so long ago, Neanderthals were considered to be at best our brutish, knuckle-dragging cousins, a now-extinct offshoot of our family tree, not directly related to us, highly evolved and superior as we are. With DNA discoveries, from Neanderthal remains, mainly teeth, found, of course, where else, in caves, scientists learned that yes, except for subSaharan Africans, we are all descendents of Neanderthals, as well as Homo sapiens.

Now another mysterious hominid group called the Denisovans has also entered the picture, and some geneticists conjecture there were others.

Diverse as we may be, since we are all still human, we want to feel that we’re among kindred spirits, if not literally among our own kin. We are, by nature, tribal. The consensus seems to be that we want people to be “diverse like me.” Powerful emotions surge around differences significant and picayune.

I know individuals who are unquestionably diverse–if one person can correctly be termed diverse–who are nevertheless scapegoated by others who don’t consider them diverse enough, or perhaps think they are diverse in the wrong ways.

Politically progressive people, while we pride ourselves on our tolerance and open-mindedness, are most comfortable among others who think the way we do. It’s clubby.

We can often tell by certain subtle and not so subtle signs who is One Of Us on any issue. In the name of diversity, we can exclude and even vilify those whom we don’t deem diverse enough, or diverse in the right way.

I guess this is the reason people are always telling me, “I don’t watch the news! I know nothing! Don’t talk politics!” It’s just too dangerous to have opinions.

Have a good week.

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(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)