I always feel a great deal of optimism whenever January rolls around. It’s a fresh new calendar year, people are re-energized from the lengthy holidays, and of course, everybody’s positive that this year… this time… finally… they’re going to fulfill their new year’s resolution.
I love the idea of the “new year’s resolution”, because it gives me an easy way of segmenting my personal goals according to the calendar year. Saying that the era before the New Year I was X and from this day forward, I’ll be Y. It’s sort of like marking a B.C. to A.D. transition for myself every year. There’s no effort needed, no forcing a buildup towards a new development, no hard work to get to a grand realization, no moral crises, no fuss; just a conscious acceptance that yesterday – bad, and tomorrow – good. And because there was no great sacrifice or journey I had to go through to spark a needed change, it doesn’t really matter whether I fulfill the resolution after making it. I’ll be the first to admit it. Just the act of saying to myself that I’m finally turning over this new leaf this year gives me enough satisfaction to not care about following through. It’s a vicious cycle that is horribly counter-productive for a chronic procrastinator like me. But alas, it is in fact that time of year again, and resolutions are in the air. So against my better judgment, I’ll have to tender mine.
This 2017 my new year’s resolution is to avoid painting one political side using the same brush just because I don’t agree with them. To try to make my explanation as politically neutral as possible, I’m going to use the colors blue and green as the political leanings I’m for and against respectively. (Although if you’ve read my previous articles, it’s easy to see where I stand.)
During the past year, I’ve noticed how political arguments over the Internet have a tendency to devolve down to a game of who can “win” with their respective “tribe”. Where anyone who even has a hint of a differing opinion gets sorted into the green tribe or the blue tribe- no question. One point in the year, I had a college friend who was a staunch green leader supporter, expressed his concerns about some of green leader’s directives. He was lambasted and labeled as a blue tribe sympathizer and was told online and elsewhere that he shouldn’t be supporting green leader if he had doubts about the leader’s capabilities. This is the sort of thinking that I have admittedly been guilty of at times during the past year.
Much to my chagrin, I’ve come to realize how this mindset is terribly unproductive and incredibly divisive. It turns out that things are never that simple, and that one side cannot be hastily sorted into one color or the other. That both sides have their fair share of the blindly militant and the optimistically level-headed and making blanket simplifications such as painting someone blue or green serves no other purpose than to make everyone colorblind. A world that only thinks in this way is how you get people who feel a sense of moral superiority and who become the very villains they think they’re fighting against. People dehumanize “the other side” thinking there is no compromising, no middle ground. You’re either with us or against us. It just fosters the impossibility of anything except a massive divide between “us” and “them”. Unfortunately, as easy and as gratifying as it is, I’ll have learn how to stop trying to make these cheap generalizations this year and maybe others will follow suit.
So in a swathe of people trying to paint each other black or blue or red or yellow, this 2017 I’ll be resolving not to resort to such base divisiveness. I’ll be rational, I’ll be open for discourse, and I’ll even be willing to compromise on things, sure.
If only I was good at following through with my new year’s resolutions.