On a day just like any other this week, two extremely wealthy people–one Internet, one Fortune 500–came up to me and asked without fanfare whether I had noticed the new level of toxicity now in the air within Aspen.

“Is it just me,” said Internet guy after biking all the way out to Carbondale, “or is there poison in the air against the rich?”

It’s not just you, oh Internet guy.

He’s a part-timer who has rented here in the summer for over a half-dozen years, but the new levels of venom limited to tourists and second-homers. The Fortune 500 guy, a man who still sits on the board of a New York Stock Exchange company, is here full-time yet he feels the same thing.

It comes down to this: class warfare is now the norm in Aspen.

You don’t think so? Then how come the rich blame the locals and the locals blame the rich for all that ails Aspen?

The rich say the locals are bitter and resentful of the success out-of-towners bring to Aspen. The locals say the rich have their butts up their ass and deserve to be detested.

Nice place to visit, huh?

Much as I’d like to, I can’t blame this on Aspen Mayor Mick Ireland and his whatever-you-say Bath Party. Mick is not the problem per se, just as any politician only reflects the will of those who elected him like shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Sure, he speaks to the locals with his soak-the-rich schemes, and the locals are the only ones allowed to vote in local elections. That means they have the power, which is as it should be.

And believe you me, the part-timers can be idiotic to the point of parody. For the most part, they glide through their weeks in Aspen as if locals are there to serve, with little or no effort to get to know the soul of the people in the town they inhabit. I’ve been here but four years, and this is not the first time I’ve heard locals decry a new level of obtuseness and rudeness on the part of those who glom onto Aspen without ever understanding the DNA of the town.

Maybe we should all be ashamed of ourselves: the locals with the illusion they rule the roost, and the visiting rich who act as if they rule the world. There is plenty of blame to go around, and like the entrance to Aspen, things are likely to get much worse. I try to be relentlessly optimistic about things but I see no solution here. The locals make Aspen possible for the rich, and the rich make Aspen possible for the locals. No wonder they hate each other.