I've never seen people as politically charged as I do now. Maybe that's a good thing, because apathy is what led a minority (and by most measures, it is a minority) to gain power in government. The apathy has been getting worse for my entire adult life, so perhaps this the collective kick in the nuts we needed.
Regardless, there are several areas of our society that are bizarrely being painted as partisan issues, and that has to stop. It's particularly disturbing in just the first week of the Trump administration.
OK, this one I get why people make it political, because of a misguided sense of obligation to protecting incumbent industries and corporations (something ironically at odds with the desire for less government and regulation... because it's just the same government and different regulation). That's a horrible idea in terms of overall economic policy, because by protecting the incumbents and deincentivizing new industry, you leave those opportunities to someone else, probably China, who gains the first-mover advantage while the incumbents fail to evolve and die. You shouldn't need a degree in economics to understand this.
That aside, science cares not what you believe. You may not believe the sky is blue, but it still is. Nowhere is this more true than with climate change. One of the surprising side effects of this is that, after years of a GOP-run Congress, the states are starting to take matters into their own hands. California and New York are taking extraordinary steps toward securing their own futures in terms of energy and the environment. As Conan The Republican found in the NatGeo doc Years Of Living Dangerously, his own party continues to put the military and the nation at risk by suppressing science and rational energy policy. Inflexible ideology doesn't make science go away, it only leaves you on the hook for ignoring what is right in front of you.
More concerning now though is this insane effort to erase from the Internet the results of scientific study by government agencies. As a taxpayer, I paid for that research, and regardless of whether or not it suits anyone's agenda, I'm entitled to see it. That's what a transparent government does. I'll be watching Data.gov very carefully, because if anything changes there, my own political involvement is going to get extreme.
Science, you see, is not a partisan issue. As Webster puts it, science is "knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method." It doesn't matter who you voted for, the atomic weight of Nitrogen is still about 14, and it still makes up about 78% of our atmosphere.
The worst strawman I've seen this week is that women marching on Washington (and around the world) last weekend was totally unnecessary, because women are equal under the law. That's the most delusional thing I've ever heard. Equality in American history is funny like that, because even outside of the Jim Crow era, inequality that is not explicitly defined leaves room for implied, legal inequality. American history has in the long run been on the right side of this, but it's slow going. Our most recent victory in that sense is the recognition that same-sex couples are due the same rights as heterosexual couples.
This too, is not a left or right issue, but the reason that it becomes political is that the absence of explicit law allows for implied legal discrimination. I admit that the last year has been an eye-opening experience for me, because in the diverse field that I work in, and the diverse places I've lived, I don't fear people who are different than me. However, a vocal minority, now in power because of the aforementioned apathy, is trying very hard to codify their fears from people of different races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientation and, still, gender. I thought we were over this.
As anyone with even the most basic education knows, we all look pretty much the same when we peel off the skin and the human constructs that we apply to our identities. And even though I don't actively practice the Christian faith that I was brought up in, the most important lesson that I took from that experience was that we need to take care of our fellow human beings, regardless of any of the circumstances or identities that they possess.
Human decency is not a left or right issue.
But practicing human decency means being a lot more flexible in how we see the world, and it requires a great deal of courage to move beyond fear of the people we don't know or understand. Ask yourself, as objectively as possible: Are the people we appoint to lead capable of exhibiting that courage to move beyond fear and embrace human decency? Do you have the self-awareness to answer that honestly?
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