The Mantra Of A Polarized Society

“La, la, la, la, la! I can’t hear you!”

I have a father whom I love, but I can’t really speak about politics with unless I agree with him. He loves Trump. I have a brother who plays the ultimate contrarian with me on anything and everything liberal. To him, Trump is fighting the ultimate conspiracy against America and the liberal left have absolutely nothing positive to offer. One of my sisters appears to be a Trump fan, the other I don’t know about. My mom? She reads lots of history books and enlightens me, but she doesn’t like to talk about politics. I love them all, no matter our politics.

I’ve tried political discourse in social media. On Facebook, it’s kind of nauseating. If I want to be a masochist for a day, I can find plenty of people who enjoy unrelenting and vitriolic taunting of me for thinking even slightly different than they do. I can’t possibly be a good liberal unless I support Joe Biden this year. Conservatives will tell me that Bernie Sanders is a socialist. The anarchists don’t like either party (I’m with them). And the libertarians disagree with me that the Libertarian Party is just a front to promote a lopsided economy in favor of big business interests.

On Twitter, I actually have had great correspondence from many different political viewpoints. I admit that my experience is not uniform. Some people are more open to different views, and some people actually try to speak with the other side with civility (applause!). And some seem to discount what the other side says just because of the source, not the facts.

But what I really get the most from political discourse is that neither side is listening to the other side. Conservatives think that everything that CNN says is an unadulterated lie while FOX News is the gospel. Liberals spend all day fact-checking FOX News without even noticing that some conservatives have some good ideas. In other words, both sides are so ready to discount the message because of the source that they never really hear what the other side is saying. We are vigilant when it comes to dismissing the other side.

The United States is a polarized nation because we don’t listen to each other anymore. The message I get from others in political discourse is that the person who states a fact is more important than the facts stated, even if the facts can be corroborated by both liberal and conservative sources. I read sources across the political spectrum to see if two…