Lesson For Today

With regards to electoral politics, there are people who believe that politicians are differently motivated or differently principled based on the party affiliation, and there are people who believe all politicians (but not necessarily all possible future politicians) to be essentially the same; money-grubbing, power-hungry influence peddlers who are only interested in personal acquisition and aggrandizement.

The lesson is not that these two views exist, or that I hold the second view, but that I am increasingly uninterested in discussing politics with any but the most open-minded and least serious of the first group. Partisanship, which inevitably takes the form of either “wah wah look what unfair thing THEY did to us” or “wah wah look what unfair blame they place on us”, now strikes the same emotional response center as the English no-empire-no-more limp-armed whining – it just makes me want to slap someone and yell “Get off the cross, we need the wood!”.