Friday, September 11, 2009

When the personal is political the people perish

So we've got some nut jobs out there...
Tiller was killed because of abortion, Pouillon was likely killed for the same reason just on the opposite side of the issue.
Rep. Wilson acted like a twelve year old at a middle school assembly, people send out political "humor" and rumor that could be construed as hate speech.
Why?
I don't know, but one guess would be that it involves the way Americans have come to perceive themselves. They perceive some part of their self as a political thing. Our partisan identity and our personal identity have merged. What our party affiliation is impacts the soul. The personal is political and the political personal.
It would be downright stupid to kill someone because of an opinion they hold that is different than my opinion, but if this opinion is more than an opinion, if it is a shard of one's soul, then that's a different story. If I am a child of the light because I'm "blue" then those who are "red" are children of darkness.
Its like we've knocked apart the door between cosmology and ideology.
I don't know. I'm sure its always been like this and I'm just showing my naive youth, but seeing people killing and hating other people for any reason just digs into me in a bad way... and you all know I'm fairly partisan.

1 comment:

Samantha said...

No, I think you make a very good point here and I don't think it was always this way. In fact I know it wasn't.