Politics: It's about people

Grade school sucked beyond words for me. Moving 4 times in 4 years, no friends, parents with their marriage distengrating as they struggled with new jobs and a new baby. I remember bullying (a girl trying to beat you up while your entire 5th grade class watches? that will scar you for life), endless teasing and a complete lack of who I was coupled with what became, at a too-young age, almost total self-loathing. Oh, yea; good times.

In a few hours, my job will end — and this is a very good thing as it is very much a dead-end job — and I will be a freelance writer. A writer. My initial plans include copywriting, web work and, primarily, political writing, at this site, BlueOregon and my other main advocacy site, Roadkill in Motion. I will write about all manner of things political: health care reform, the environment, bicycling and transportation, election reform and so on. And although I wrote something very similar to this thought just last week, it’s too easy to forget: I am writing about people.

People’s lives. Their hopes, their dreams, their ability to be healthy and happy. Political writing can be about things — policy, laws, statistics — but, ultimately, politics is about people. This is something that is very easy to forget. Since politics involves people struggling against other people — everyone, it seems, has a different idea of what it means to be happy and how to achieve it — it is too easy to become locked on the struggle and not the human outcomes.

When your personal tendency is to hate people, this becomes even more problematic.

I don’t like to think that I hate people; I probably don’t. But my affection for human beings is tempered, or perhaps “challenged” would a better word, by my experiences as a kid. All the years of lonely, humiliating sadness, from kindergarten through 8th grade and beyond took their toll on me. A mistaken, destructive venture into Christianity did not help, nor did a failed marriage and badly handled post-divorce fatherhood. To focus on what politics means to people’s lives, and to do so empathically and not politically or theoretically, does not come easy to me.

Getting reminded as I rode the bus this morning helped. I sat there and looked at the different people, heading to work and school, all sitting in quietly, each with the same desires for happiness and peace I bear, and I realized that if I am going to write about politics on a full-time basis, I have to keep in mind that it’s about life. The millions of people who have fundamentally different views of the world from me: they are only different in what they believe. They want to be happy. They want to care for their families. They want the world to be a better place. If these fundamental facts of our lives are identical, and I believe they are, then the politics can begin and end on common ground.

If the politics is truly about people, the struggle is not between right and wrong, truth and lie, you and me; it’s between myself and what I do not yet understand about others and the rest of the world.