It is early in our lives when we are told to pick our “favorites,” to pick our sides. If you live in the New York area, it’s the choice between the Mets and the Yankees. You pick your team and defend your side like your life depends on it as you vilify the opposition (God damn Yankees). You pick kick ball teams in gym class that can break even the tightest of friendship bonds.

Picking sides has even infiltrated our pop culture. The recent Captain America movie divided the audience to join Team Captain or Team Iron Man, subsequently called “Civil War.” Meanwhile, the whole purpose of the Avengers franchise is to unify a team of superheroes, yet we must analyze the pros and cons of the internal conflict.

These habits stick with us beyond our childhoods, and to me, that seems like a bad habit that we refuse to let die. I have started noticing these bad habits in all adults, from college students to the retired, by the way we react to the news before we even know what is on the news.

Elections are treated by some by picking a party and supporting your party’s candidate and finding every little way to be repulsed by the other candidate. These blinders prevent people from actually reviewing candidates plans and platforms because they already know for whom they will cast their ballot. Narrow-mindedness is continued by literally tuning into the news outlets that feed us the opinions we already know we agree with as a means of literally tuning out the opposing views.

Elections are easy to judge the biases of both groups and individuals. Reactions to complex current events can become equally polarizing.

Whenever there is a mass shooting, people know exactly how they are going to respond before they know any details of the event. This is a moment that people who are for restricting guns in America use a tragedy to further their point to ban specific weaponry. Those who are staunch advocates of 2nd Amendment Rights immediately respond with their beliefs that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. To be honest, both points hold great arguments, except neither side would know this because there isn’t a concerted effort to have an open conversation without opinion biases and ad hominem attacks.

The same standstill occurs when there is a case of a police officer shooting an unarmed black man. The Black Lives Matter movement rallies around the assumption that the officer is racist, while others feel the need to jump to the officers defense against quick assumptions. Neither side understands the other’s perspective which leads to poor assumptions about each others intentions. If both sides can come to the agreeable conclusions that not all cops are racist and that the African Americans do not feel safe and represented in their communities and by law enforcement, then we can move on to effective conversations and forward change. Sadly, we stake out claims into one side of an argument and refuse to acknowledge the positives of the other side. And yet -- we still expect change.

Now this is not me saying that you cannot be very passionate about a stance on an issue. However, if you take that stance, be prepared to defend your view with facts and logic over opinions and emotions. Logic is never wrong, people can just favor an alternative logic. Appealing to logic might not always win people over to your side, but it will at least allow others the opportunity to understand your stance in a coherent and respectable fashion.

With bad habits of biases ingrained in society, I think that there is a serious problem of people refusing to grow up in how they handle adult problems. As a society, we have accepted these pseudo-temper tantrums as true communication of beliefs and expect something good to come from it. If we continue to be dramatic about our causes while ignoring the other side of the arguments, then do we as a society really deserve any change?