Why can’t we all just get along ?

I am going to break one of the rules of social media and talk about politics. I’ve had lots of conversations with people I know who generally share my views on issues, but being disenfranchised and fear based, have the strong feeling that politics should never be talked about.

And to a point I agree. People are so strongly aligned along party lines, that if you say the wrong thing, you will alienate many people. The weird thing for me is that most people don’t even know why they follow those party lines.

I spoke to a very smart young man a while back and asked him which party he belonged to.

“The X party”, he said.

“Why did you choose that party?”,  I asked assuming he would have a logical reason for why he joined that party.

“Well, I guess mostly because my parents were in the X party”, he replied.

And even stranger, the lines shift based on what the other party is saying. An idea that one party comes up with is immediately opposed by the other, even if that idea is a plank in the opposing party’s platform.

Take the recent rhetoric about the healthcare reform work. From everything I’ve seen, what is being proposed is almost exactly the same thing that the Republicans proposed when Clinton was trying to get them to move on universal healthcare. A sort of modified version of what we have today that tries to fix the biggest fiscal problems with our current system.

But who is labeling this “Obamacare” and calling it socialism? It appears to me that it is the same people who caused Clinton to crash and burn, and who proposed the approach of universal health care combined with capitalism.

This is but one example, but there seem to be endless times that  opposition is simply a tribal fight. The Democrats reject all Republican ideas, the Republicans reject all the Libertarian ideas, and they all view each other as bad and wrong. It’s one reason I don’t declare a party, and would probably still be independent if I didn’t want to vote in primaries.

I often wonder if we just got rid of the parties, could we have an intelligent discussion about the issues. Are people just naturally unwilling to consider other viewpoints?

For me, health care is broken, and there are simple things we could do to fix some of the big problems. By making sure people could actually see doctors when they need to, we would reduce the burden on emergency rooms and hospitals caused by people who have either had to forgo care that would have been less expensive.

Add to that fixing some of the corruption in the insurance industry (which also prevents people from getting care early with things like “pre-existing condition” clauses), and not only would  health care costs go down, but productivity would go up, due to a healthier population.

It’s not rocket science, it’s what we need, and anything is better than the current system that is bankrupting the country.