December 29, 2022
The world feels more divided than ever, with the stakes higher than I’ve experienced in my life. Society is broken into teams where the rules are arbitrary, so hypocrisy is inevitable.
A little background on myself: I grew up in Denver, Colorado, very religious, so naturally I was a conservative. I thought about politics a lot and would defend my positions often using “facts and logic”. F&L are in quotes here because the funny thing about data is you can manipulate it to mean whatever you want. There is nothing more valueable and useless as data. I’m sure I’ll get back to that at some point.
Anyway, when I went to college in my early 20’s, I became a liberal. Tale as old as time. Conservative kid from the suburbs goes off to school, gets educated, and tells his parents they’re bigots at Thanksgiving. As the cliche continues, I found myself becoming conservative again after I started a family.
It was near this time that I saw the false binary. Am I just going to go back and forth between these two dumb categories, appropriately changing lanes at the corresponding life milestone? Or can I just think about my own values (the things that are actually important to me)? Sometimes politicians completely ignore the things that are very important to me, and usually they spend time on things that are of little or no consequence or interest to me at all. And yet I pleadge allegiance to them?
No thanks. It has been easy for me to associate with republicans because I continue to be a very conservative person. But living a conservative life is a life choice, not a political association. Being conservative is between me and my family, and I have exited the binary game, because it is not for me to weaponize a vote that could affect anyone else’s life or family.
Perhaps the reason we feel polarized, in a high-stakes game these days is because democracy has been weaponized, 1 person against another. Someone could hate me for what I think, but that would be very weird of them, because I will do nothing that could harm them. I won’t vote for a politician or a policy that will give the government power over your life. You may think that if I’m not with you, I’m against you, or if I am a conscientious abjector I am a traitor. That sounds like a personal problem. I will be here with a couple of cold ones if you want to talk about it.
Jarom Reid 