This is the third entry in my Morning Drift series — a personal search and journal of gratitude, presence, and the shifting truths I find in sobriety. These aren’t polished guides or programs, just lived moments: presence, gratitude, reflections, frustrations, questions, and the daily work of finding balance.
It’s early, and my mind drifts into the candy aisle. Gummy bears, of all things.
When you think about them, you picture the bag — multicolored, multiflavored bears staring back. Most people don’t eat them at random. They sort. They pick out the colors they like. They dig for favorites, or they leave behind the ones they don’t. Kind of like jelly beans. Nobody likes the licorice one. (Well, I do, but that’s beside the point.) Same with Skittles. Open a pack, and I separate them by color. Any candy with multiple flavors, I end up sorting.
And that’s the heart of it. Gummy Bear Politics is picking and choosing. It’s sorting. It’s deciding. And sometimes shunning.
Sour Gummies and Gummy Worms
Every story needs its bad guys, and in this bag, it’s the sour gummies and the gummy worms.
Sour gummies don’t blend in, they divide the room. You either swear by them or spit them out. They sting your tongue, hijack the conversation, and pull every other candy into their sour orbit. They don’t compromise — they polarize.
And then there’s the gummy worm. Restless, intrusive, always wriggling into the middle of things. Too long to fit in the bear clusters, too bendy to stay put. It winds itself around groups, tangles alliances, and topples neat little coalitions just by barging in.
Together, they’re chaos in chewy form — souring the mood, unsettling the order, and reminding every bear in the bag that politics rarely plays fair.
How Many Reds in a Bag?
I can’t help but wonder — is there a “gummy count”? Do companies decide how many reds, yellows, or greens go in? Or is it just luck when you pull a bag with more of your favorite flavor? Some groups end up over-represented, some rare, some overlooked.
And the flavors themselves aren’t even universal. In the U.S., it’s five: Raspberry (red), Orange (orange), Strawberry (green), Pineapple (clear), Lemon (yellow). In Germany, they add Apple. So even across borders, the same bears can’t agree on what belongs.
Sorting Beyond Candy
I’ll admit it — I sort. Reds with reds. Greens with greens. Yellows off in their own pile. It feels clean, logical, tidy. But that order only lasts in theory — because the piles all end up in the same place: my belly.
And it’s not just candy. We do this everywhere. Music — we like some, dismiss the rest. Sports — same. School — kids cluster by groups. Food — don’t even get me started on fish tacos and cheesesteaks. Some people in Philly argue Pat’s or Geno’s (I can’t imagine why…). Me? I’ll take Dalessandro’s in Roxborough. In San Diego, some swear by Rubio’s for fish tacos. Me, I’ll argue for Kiko’s food truck down in Mission Valley that gave me the best fish taco I ever had.
Everyone picks their flavor. Everyone claims their spot. And that’s fine — until it slips into surrounding yourself with only the same taste, the same color, the same flavor over and over. That’s where the slope gets slippery.
When Flavors Collide
Life doesn’t stay sorted. Gummies melt. Fish tacos get soggy. Cheesesteaks can be served with dry, flavorless steak. Suddenly the neat little piles blur together — gummies melting into a sticky mess, tacos losing their crunch, cheesesteaks tasting like a carne asada sandwich. Once in a while the chaos surprises you with something good. Most of the time, it just ruins the meal. Either way, you’ve got to keep eating.
And maybe that’s the point. Politics isn’t so different. Most of us don’t taste every flavor before choosing a favorite — we inherit them. Just like religion, or the town we grew up in, or the family recipes passed down without question. We’re products of our environments, handed a bag already half-sorted. And even if we change flavors later, even if we switch parties or creeds or teams, we sometimes carry the same old prejudices with us.
Maybe gummy bear politics is just a reminder that no matter how much we cling to our tribes, we’re all made of the same sugar in the end. Melt us down and we’d lose our colors, our shapes, our stubborn separations. Bears and worms alike. We’d just be — one sticky, messy, unrecognizable whole.
The question is: would that be progress, or just a melted mess? Wasn’t that the American experiment — the so-called “melting pot”? Or maybe it was never about melting at all. Maybe we’ve always been more of a mixed bag: bright, clashing, uneven, and somehow still surviving together… and tasting magical.
Progress or melted mess — maybe the real politics is in how we taste it.
Part three of the Morning Drift series — Tides and Truth: No single tide, no single truth…
Tides and Truth... 