This past week when I was tabling at Texas A&M with a few of my friends, we struck up a conversation with a guy passing by who seemed slightly interested in what we had to say. A couple minutes in, we asked him if he wanted to sign up to stay up-to-date on what we were doing on-campus.
His response?
"Oh, I hate politics."
The words of a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual who thinks he is better than people who are politically active. In a time where the left and the right are so painfully polarized, it makes sense for people to hate what goes on in Washington. There are valid reasons that people feel shut out, manipulated, and ignored by our government.
My friend's response was "Well, it affects every aspect of your life".
She was so right, and here's the truth: hating and not participating in politics is a self-destructive, ignorant tendency that speaks volumes of how little people know and care. It's an understood fact by most Americans that most politicians spend significantly more time talking with donors than their constituents, but, for a variety of reasons, that's just how it is.
A myth a lot of Americans, especially young people, believe is that it's just the elected officials who are involved when the fact of the matter is that there are many interest groups, lobbying firms, think tanks, media avenues, and non-government organizations that play a massive role in decisions that are made.
However, I dare the people who "hate politics" to tell me that the business world, relationships, social circles, and every facet of our lives aren't political in one sense or another. In everything we do, we push our agenda and make decisions to best benefit ourselves, so to claim to "hate politics" is to lie about being selfless and completely agenda-free.
Because of the impactful nature of politics, to "hate politics" is to ignorantly not care about how policy impacts you.
It affects how much gets taken from each of your paychecks and how it's used. It affects how much you pay to go to the doctor and how private that information is. It affects what our children are expected to learn in school and how well they are taught it. It affects how safe we are here in the homeland and how stable the rest of the world is. It determines who in the world we support and why. It affects the taxes we pay, the water we drink, the roads we drive on, and the laws we are responsible for abiding me.
So to "hate politics" is to give Washington the go-ahead to bit-by-bit grab onto control of your wallet and life, and to not care is to be held captive by ignorance. None of us are "above" politics because we all feel its repercussions in one way or another. You aren't better than political people because when it all comes down to it, we are all political, and that's just how it is.
