Now more than ever seems to be a time of political volatility, Suddenly everyone and their mothers (literally) are involving themselves in heated arguments. I’ve seen harsh words said and marches crop up over so many different issues and they all seem to revolve around the larger-than-life- character of Donald Trump. Objectively speaking, though, what does all this arguing achieve? The answer increasingly seems to be nothing. Why is this?

Now-a-days partisan lines feel blurred and inadequate. The more commonly used division is that of conservatives versus liberals. Across that line there seems to be something common in both, and that’s they’re both “hard of hearing”. At least that’s the most rational explanation I can come up with since there seems to be an epidemic of one side not acknowledging the other. From the conservative side, there’s name-calling of the liberals being cry-babies, naive, and simply going through a “phase”. On the flip-side, liberals call conservatives old-fashioned, xenophobic and fearful of progress. This name calling always seems to come out as the “end” of arguments. The two generally do start a conversation and then there’s a name calling battle that attempts to belittle the other side and therefore diminish the validity of their arguments. Such a process archives nothing, because then it shifts to personal insults and loses it’s original purpose. when this happens as often as it does, everyone develops an innate defensive nature regarding politics. There seems to become an intense grip to an ideology as if everyone were going to attack it, and thereby you. Sure while some people may come after your political beliefs, but becoming so fiercely defensive ruins any well meaning discussion. We begin to see a breakdown of inter-dialogue and transfer of ideas. Now the prevailing course of action is fiercely protect our ideals and entrench ourselves further with a diminished sensitivity to the world around us. This isn’t specific to either of the two aforementioned groups either. If you look, it can be found in both groups and that’s where the name-calling latches itself onto. Equally important to realize is that that doesn’t apply to the whole movement. Just because there can be some examples of xenophobia and of naivety doesn’t mean that everyone associated is as well. Unfortunately, the most heard voices are the ones that seem to fit that bill, not because it’s the loudest, but because it’s the easiest to scandalize. Those can be brandished as an atrocity to a cause, which in turn is shown everywhere and becomes the misnomer for the whole movement. This can be counteracted by doing work to uncover facts and information from a wider breadth of sources, but why would anyone want to do that? This is the world of the instantaneous. What we see is what is. This unfortunately leaves some more well informed statements out to dry because they weren’t being talked about as much.

With so many political discussions going on right now, it’s important to have some periods of self-reflection. We need to see how it is we’re all interacting with each other, because political inclinations aside, we’re all a single nation and we need to conduct ourselves that way. Division is not going to help in that nation’s progress, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum.