Politics is too important to be taken seriously – enough with the judgment

Joe Biden and Donald Trump (Patrick Semansky/Evan Vucci/AP)

July 25 2020 02:30 AM

I was talking to the wife the other night about the toxic polarisation of politics today. Don’t sneer at me — we’ve been on lockdown for four months and have run out of anything else to discuss.

We were looking at an American news channel’s reports of the various protests and riots and the sheer, unadulterated hatred that now seems to exist between both sides.

I pointed out that the American side of my family were always pretty evenly divided along traditional Democrat/Republican affiliations.

One aunt was a caring, sharing Democrat. Her husband was a staunch Republican.

They would come back to the old country most years and I got to grow up listening to them bicker at the dinner table when they visited.

They didn’t agree on anything but they loved each other dearly. Fast-forward a few years and we now see articles in American newspapers telling women to divorce their husband if he votes for Trump.

People need to take their foot off the gas for a few minutes and remember one thing — politics is not the be-all and end-all of everything.

In fact, I often joke that politics is too important to take seriously. We seem to have moved into a culture where someone who has a different point of view is no longer someone... who simply holds a different point of view. Now they are positively evil, morally bankrupt and very likely a Nazi.

This is what American writer Greg Gutfeld calls ‘team sport politics’, where everyone picks their favourite team and then behaves like a hooligan when they don’t get their way.

Enough of this judgmental nonsense. Just judge people the old-fashioned way — by their record collection.