You’re right. I’t much easier and therefore better to say that the other side is wrong and my side is right. That makes the world much easier to understand and lets us pretend our partisanship is making a real difference, doesn’t it?
Look, pretending things aren’t the way they are is really just choosing to live in a fantasy world simply because the issues are so complex it makes you want to ‘just give up’. Cheering mindlessly for one side or the other has been tried now for over 200 years and look what it’s gotten us.
I think it’s time to realize that change will never come from within a system which works only to perpetuate itself. As Upton Sinclair put it - It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Anyone who reads 1984 comes to understand the evil of big brother. The difference between a rational conservative and a rational liberal is where they fear the big brother will come from. The conservative may worry about bureaucrats and run away social spending bringing about a nanny state big brother while a rational liberal worries about the military industrial complex and corporate machinations bringing the big brother state about. Here’s the thing, they are both right to worry and their goals are actually very compatible.
The problem comes in the way we are presented the two sides by our media. We are shown the irrational-fear mongering-side taking-partisanship view only. We are literally being programmed to have an us versus them mentality. This programming is not some plot or evil scheme. It is simply a natural result of a 24 hour news cycle where no one ever reports that nothing is happening. It is their job to sensationalize and emotionalize the news. After decades of this, many of us can’t think in any other terms.
Yet the truth is that we all want the same thing. We want peace, equal opportunity, and justice. It’s not the world or the people who are in such a mess. It is our governments and media that have failed us. So, instead of picking sides in an entirely imaginary political construct, how about we hold all sides accountable and try to effect change directly instead of through legislation, taxes, and regulation?
