Politics, religion, and conspiracies… oh my!
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
Mark Twain
I have not posted anything lately because the only thing on my mind has been related to one of those three topics. I keep thinking to myself, just give it some time, and maybe something a bit less polarizing and easier to write about will come up.
Well, I’ve been waiting… and nothing else really has popped up to write about. I think the only benefit to my waiting is that I can take the viewpoint of observation and how I’ve changed rather than a post of pure frustration.
To lay the groundwork I’ll tell you that I have been a life-long Republican who very rarely has put much thought into politics.
To be completely honest, I picked my party affiliation simply because that’s the affiliation of my family and the primary affiliation of our small-town community. I’m from Kansas, so big surprise there right. It’s just what we were, and I never took too much stock into what it meant to be one side vs the other.
While I had never really examined closely the differences between Republican and Democratic parties, I of course understood the high-level differences in philosophy between the two and essentially considered myself somewhere in-between the two.
So you could say I was a moderate conservative.
Time for Change
In Kansas, you actually have 4 options to choose from when you register to vote. There are three political parties recognized; Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian and then there is a fourth option to declare yourself as “Not affiliated with a party”.
As I mentioned before, I have always been registered as a Republican, but now I have made the decision to update my voter registration to “Not affiliated with a party”.
There are multiple reasons for my decision that I won’t get into because I want my Trump supporters to keep reading. Unless I lost them already. LOL.
Over the past four years, I went from a Trump voter (I don’t think I can ever claim to be a Trump supporter) hoping he would shake things up in Washington a bit and cause both parties to get their “you know what” together and bring us a real candidate for 2020.
Little did I know that Trump was going to shake up and nearly break the entire country.
There are more reasons than just not being a fan of Trump for my decision, but without Trump, I probably never would have even thought that much about politics.
Like I said earlier, politics is not something I have historically ever put too much effort into, but now I find myself paying more attention. Maybe this is simply because I’m getting older. Maybe it’s because there are historically significant events transpiring before us. Maybe it’s simply because I worry about what we are leaving behind for our children.
In my lifetime I feel like we are at an all-time high with political tensions, racial tensions, class tensions, and on and on.
To be fair to the Republicans, as this is not an anti-Republican post, I’m not claiming that the Democrats are without fault. There are equally as extreme aspects of the Democratic party that I don’t identify with as well which is why I chose “Unaffiliated”.
Until enough people are willing to break away from the concept of Republican vs Democrat being opposites with no room for overlap, for common sense, or for compromise, we are going to be stuck in this endless negative feedback loop from hell that increasingly polarizes the country rather than bringing it together.
What makes America the greatest country in the world is this: We ALL have the freedom to make our own choices and formulate our own beliefs. We need to be able to have constructive conversations based on actual facts between people with open minds who are able to reach compromise when there are areas of difference in order to truly “make America great again”.
Without this, we will never move forward.
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