Since I am a member of neither "team" and don't feel either one represents my preferred ideals and policies particularly well, I end up being more of a neutral observer. I see REALLY smart friends and relatives at each other's throats, for no reason other than their team identity. It's especially bad on social media, possibly due to the arm's-length nature of that type of communication, and possibly due to the relative anonymity of internet fighting with "friends of friends." But I also see it live, in person, all the time.
It baffles me. Three decades ago and more, people disagreed on matters of policy and ideology, and discussed it openly, and were still able to remain cordial if not friendly. That's just not common anymore, at all. It's sad, I feel. I'm not sure how to navigate back, as long as people choose to identify with a particular team, rather than ideals. I just don't see it getting any better.
I think social media has been VERY damaging in this sense.
I.e. on this board [and its predecessors], we all learned about each other through a certain non-political prism. And as a result, we made our opinions of each other [for good or ill] based on things that were not political. Once those opinions hardened, they were less likely to be overridden by political beliefs, especially when politics was <1% of the discussion here.
I think this is how life was prior to social media. You became friends with people through all sorts of things, and very rarely was it because you met at a political rally. So you built friendships that were basically unencumbered by politics, and then over the years you realized that sometimes your friends didn't agree on politics, but so be it. You didn't have to sit around talking politics all the time.
But then came social media... Where the nature of the communication is a one-to-many share, which is highly conducive to political activism rather than a conversation with a friend. It's also highly conducive to communication-by-meme, which is about the lowest common denominator of political activism. Memes are about promulgating emotions, not about reasoned debate. Reasoned debate produces "tl;dr".
So all of a sudden you're being bombarded by the half-baked political opinions of your long-time friends, your extended family [crazy Aunt Ruth], those half-way acquaintances who you don't actually talk to but it would be rude to not accept a friend request, and often all sorts of other people that don't make it into your inner circle but who are close enough that you're "Facebook friends". And bombarded with all this, it is sometimes hard not to try to push back by spouting your *own* half-baked political opinions. And thus become part of the problem.
I don't do Facebook any more because of this. I simply can't go on Facebook without getting angry in the first 10 minutes. And literally if I spend more than 15, suddenly I want to reply to the morons. But if I do that, then I'm part of the problem. So I don't do it at all.
But that's an impulse that most people have trouble controlling, so Facebook becomes a cesspool which does more to HARM our relationships with the people in our lives than to help. But everyone's afraid to unplug.
So it gets worse, and worse. And I don't see a solution on the horizon.
