Stop saying we’re too politicized. The word, and what we’re trying to say with it, is now pretty meaningless.
Politicized is a useless word. It’s the “back in my day” of talking points.
I know we’re trying to communicate something, but politicized is the wrong word for it. Or perhaps it is the wrong frame for understanding our world.
We are communicating two incompatible things when we say our country is “politicized.”
- That everything has become political—and it wasn’t before. Like politics is electricity and now it has electrified everything.
- That everything is innately political—and can’t be rendered as apolitical.
We’re trying to live with two conflicting understandings at the same time.
I suspect that we’re trying to harken back to a time when things didn’t feel as charged as they do now. So we are longing for a sense of things not being political. But we’re also insisting that all things are political and we don’t know what to do with that.
Because, whether or not they became political, we are pretending that everything just is.
The problem isn’t the obvious paradox.
We insist that we remain trapped by it.
Our present did not magically become politicized. Stuff has always been political. We’re acting like politics not only never divided us, it never silenced or prevented us from acting before. That’s just not true.
While there may be more political energy now than a few years ago, that political energy isn’t itself the problem.
The problem is that we’re avoiding the actions that would fix our common problems. This isn’t because we’re somehow different from who we were a decade ago. It is more a product of our not being different.
Our problem isn’t polarization. We refuse to fix our common problems. And we enable dysfunctional and antisocial behaviors, calling them political.
Stop blaming political division for inaction. Blame the political inaction itself.