The Black Widow of American Politics

Political self-fulfilling prophecies have lured hapless Americans into a formidable web and will soon devour them alive.

21st Century American politics has effectively become two mentally identical groups of people convinced that the other is practically Satan, treating each other as such which only reinforces their prior reputations of each other leading into a vicious cycle.

Whether Democrat or Republican, Liberal or Conservative, Communist or Capitalist, each side is doubling down into conveniently self-aggrandizing political narratives that usually have something to do with affirming the views of themselves and conveniently villainizing everyone else. This has led to a harrowing situation in which each side has created a self-fulfilling prophecy which grows ever more extreme and hostile in response to the self-fulfilling prophecy of the other side.

Republicans have convinced themselves that the dirty “libs” hate America, freedom, economic prosperity, God, golden retrievers, cherry pie, and everything else that is good and holy. Democrats have convinced themselves that the hick-ish hordes who serve the greedy corporations that form the Republicans hate equality, the gays, minorities, charity, and everything else that is good and holy.

Republicans sense the hostility from Democrats and perceive no future in a “Democrat’s America.” They’re so disgusted with the Democratic attacks on everything they want to be true that they fail to sympathize and acknowledge when Democratic brains think up legitimate points.

Democrats are no better. They see the unyielding resolve of Republicans and fail to understand why anybody would ever hold onto guns, capitalism, and the value of a human life at conception. As a result, Democrats see no place for themselves in a “Republican’s America” and they fail to sympathize with the legitimate points that Republican brains think up.

Basically they both hate each other because they think the other side hates what is good which results in them hating each other even more.

This has set up a cycle in which the incoherent political noise in America has become excruciatingly deafening as both sides build up more hostility and more reasons to fail to listen to one another.

Neither side seems big enough to stop and say just for a moment, “Those are humans too, and it wouldn’t make much sense for any human being, at least in those numbers, to collectively be as atrociously awful as I think they must be. Maybe I’ll at least try to listen and find out what they think is important.”

Instead, every Democrat is a welfare abuser, and ever Republican is a greedy self-serving pig. Every Democrat is a family-establishment hating pervert, and every Republican is a gay-hating bigot. Every Democrat is a baby hater, and every Republican is a woman hater. Every Democrat is in on a one-world-government conspiracy, and every Republican is a racist. Every Democratic politician is a communist crook, and every Republican politician is a fascist crook. Every Democrat is one and the same with crack-pot liberal professors or their sycophant students, and Republicans are all brain-dead rednecks. The list goes on and on. Undoubtedly some people fit those molds in both camps, but the self-fulfilling prophecies have become so loud that they cause the entire “other side” to sound exactly like the extremist outliers – and both sides have extremist outliers.

Nevertheless, every single day there are instances like a lesbian Democrat helping an elderly Republican man pick up the wallet he dropped on the sidewalk, or a Christian Republican man spotting a few dollars for a minority woman buying baby formula and diapers when she comes up short at the cash register.

Small, seemingly insignificant acts of kindness like those extended to anybody and everybody we happen to come across without a second thought remind us that we are all human. We are all Americans. When we allow virtues to guide us rather than our own political narratives, we rise above our own petty self-righteous stubbornness.

Listen to the part of you that seeks out those small acts of kindness for other people when you do politics. Listen to that part of you more than you listen to the politicians and media outlets who have everything to gain by helping you double down on small-minded political narratives.

The web spun by self-fulfilling prophecies that Americans have fallen into is dangerous. Their own self-fulfilling prophecies about “the others” will turn on them and inject them with a poison that will throw them into a tormenting political death as they watch their country spiral into a hate-driven chaos that they could have avoided.