The Single Issue Political Conundrum

I understand the passion of the single-issue political mindset because I have walked in those shoes. Many parts of me are non-negotiable. That fire was put into me for a reason, and you can’t make it go out! It is the pilot light that keeps my thoughts and actions on track.

Many objections that voters have to one of the major party candidates or the other are based on a single issue and not the entirety of the platforms on all other matters. It is hard to see beyond the blinders of a passionate personal belief and take a realistic big-picture look at the results of following that idea to its obvious, and sometimes unpredictable, extreme. To make things more complicated, many hot-button topics are not really part of the political agenda. They are distractions from what is really going on. No, it’s not a great overt conspiracy to delude the citizenry, but it is planned and executed by people with an agenda… to perpetuate the status quo. Many important things are hidden from view and many unimportant become the main talking points.

When your passion enters the political forum, ask yourself if it belongs there at all. If it does, give it a priority of importance to you. If the system allows you to make up your own mind and form intelligent decisions based on your beliefs, it can’t be wrong… and nobody can tell you it’s wrong. If you have been misinformed in your search for truth, or if ideas are squelched before they are allowed to be heard, then you may be wrong and not know it. An informed electorate will make decisions based on facts and logic. There is never a checkered flag on information gathering and fact checking.  

Politicians will use half-truths and outright lies to convince us that our passion is all we need. This is how we have been whipped into action to beg for more and more government without considering the costs. This is how we are forced to rationalize being both anti-abortion and pro-capital punishment at the same time. When we trade away a bit of our self for short-term gains, we are also whittling down our liberties. When we spend money on programs that are frivolous or unnecessary, we are mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren. Unfortunately, the archaic two-party system that we have learned to hate shows no signs of giving up the duopoly to allow independent thinkers to participate in the national discussion.

Parents, would you tell your children that they have no chance to achieve their dreams and must choose to be either a chicken farmer or a pig farmer? Why on earth would they need more than two choices? Well, life is not always about one certainty or another. There are more than two crayons in the box. There are more ideas than can fit into two dogmatic political viewpoints. There is more than left and right… and the middle doesn’t have to be a compromise.  

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