I can remember having dinner with a friend about eight years ago and we were talking about politics. Back then, the world was a very different place and I liked to describe myself as politically neutral. To this day, I don’t have an affinity for any particular political party or politician, but I realise that political neutrality is simply not possible.
I have always held on to various moral beliefs, relating to things like helping those in need, sharing with others, not discriminating against people for things beyond their control and, simply, being kind whenever possible. These moral beliefs are very important to me and I try to behave respectfully of them at all times. However, over the years, more and more often, I found people viewing these moral beliefs as political issues – it was almost hard to believe that people could take issue with these points when, frankly, they’re such simple and basic morals.
All the while this was happening, I gained some first hand experience in the government’s failures towards its people and learned about the horrible experiences of close friends. Now, of course, we live in a world where the government has been responsible for the deaths of countless thousands of innocent people and we’re just supposed to accept that.
At this point in time, I would be considered by lots of people to be a very political person. Indeed, one person even stopped being friends with me because they disagreed with things that I believed. But I don’t like to think of myself as political – all the political parties have large flaws and are fallible and I never vote for a party for the sake of voting for a party – but I do like to think of myself as somebody with a strong sense of morality which, these days, it seems, means that you are a political person. I almost feel like a stereotypical bitter old person in saying this, but it sometimes feels that there is a genuine lack of basic morality in our society these days.