The Political as the Personal

I have been thinking a lot lately about my  self-identity. There is a shift, I am trying to force, from being a selfish person to a more social, political one. This means a reorganization of ethics.

I had a chance to talk to a Democrat a couple of weeks ago. He was the friend of a friend and we ended up talking for a while about politics and society. When I mentioned my disappointment with the Obama administration's escalation of the war in Afghanistan there was this... scoff. It's hard to describe the sound he made, but it was something between condescension and pity. As if I didn't really understand the Very Serious Matter of butchering innocent civilians for some vague, shifting geopolitical goal. He proceeded not to take me seriously for the rest of the conversation.

Of all of the people that I have respected, admired and have tried to emulate in my life I think I gravitate towards the men and women who have the capacity for empathy. Not power. Not money. Not even talent - but the ability to teach others to open up their emotional landscape to include the six billion other human beings around them.

So when I talk about single payer, I am not thinking about policy; I am thinking about other people's suffering. When I talk about Afghanistan, I am trying my best to imagine what it is like for my neighborhood to be bombed by American planes. When I talk about the financial crisis, I think about evictions and livelihood's being ruined. And so on and so forth.

This is the crux of what I am trying to get at:

It drives me fucking insane when people openly talk about not caring about politics. Not even openly, but proudly, as if it is a positive thing that they are ignoring the power structures and economic forces that affect billions of other human beings.

It may be from a point of privilege that I have the leisure to spend hours of my week reading political articles in addition to living a daily life. But it is also arrogant and, I think, ethically deformed to assign yourself to willful ignorance over the suffering and pain of the people around you. Financial regulation, health-care reform and stopping the war in Afghanistan matter because people's lives matter. It matters when a family gets evicted from their home. It matters when people become bankrupt over hospital bills. It matters when a marine gets their body blown apart from an IED. And it also matters when a mother in Afghanistan, a country that I have never been and will probably never go to, dies because of what my country decides to do.