You can’t go outside (or online) today without hearing about some tired political issue being brought up, again, along with some generic, over-generalized, judgmental sentiment.

“Gun laws are so screwed up in this country. Everyone who has one is a murderer and should be ashamed of themselves!”

Or

“Illegal immigration is the worst because ‘Mexicans’ keep coming over our boarders and stealing our jobs. Anyone who enables that is a job-stealer (or terrorist sympathizer) and should be ashamed of themselves!”

So how do we respond to those claims? How do we engage in the default political argument at hand?

Most people seem to pick their side and join in, judging the supposed perpetrator of whatever the issue is. For one, that’s a natural impulse — and, for two, it is very easy to do. You also get to claim moral superiority, and the pride in that is just… splendid. So, who wouldn’t choose to partake in that?

Unfortunately, the answer to that is: very few people.

From my own experience, I can attest that it is a major sacrifice to try to be the bigger person and to consider the alternative perspective. It takes a lot of effort and patience to overcome the barrage of unfounded, radical claims that will be levied against you for the mere thought of asking “Well, do you think they might have a point — at least a little bit? Do you think that maybe 1/2 the population which shares the opposite political temperament of yours must be getting those ideas from somewhere? And, if we hope to disprove it, we might consider seeking to understand and empathize before we judge and persecute?”

Undoubtedly, by the way, the answer will be something like: No, because that makes you a Nazi, or a snowflake, or a racist, or a liberal (who knew ‘liberal’ was an insult now? 🤔). But the point is that I’ve learned that we have lost the ability to communicate, and it is SCARY.

I’m not sure if many of you are history buffs, but did you know that our ancestors have conveniently laid out some very useful precedents by which we may learn how radicalism from both sides (left and right) plays out? If you consider that conservatives like hierarchies and structure to keep things fair, and liberals like mandated equality to keep things fair, then you can start to understand where the respective radical ends could take us.

In the case of Hitler, he put his chosen race of people at the top of the hierarchy and retained all the power exclusively for them, while murdering the rest. In the case of Stalin, he implemented such strict communist conditions that everyone who had any “advantage” — earned or unearned, would be condemned as an “oppressor” and therefore would be murdered while the rest starved to death.

Neither radical sides of the spectrum have worked to do anything except create massive inequality and death.

So next time you have the opportunity to engage in a political discussion and choose to simply pick a side and persecute another, just remember: which radical, deadly fate are you choosing for the rest of us?