Voyeurism

So much to write ... so little time.

I spent three days in DC attending a political convention for a client. I have always remained painfully neutral on paper regarding politics, so I can easily slide between one side and the other, voting my mind, feeling beholden to no one.

Going to this convention was not neutral. However, I approached it with a sort of open mind - going to test the waters again. I've been disenfranchised with politics and parties of late. As a friend said on Sunday, "I'm too passionate about politics to be this apathetic," which describes me exactly.

I left feeling as if my political ideologies had been crushed to smithereens. I left feeling almost personally attacked. I left, tempted for a moment, to do a radical about-face and run screaming to the other side of the aisle, before realizing that if I attended one of THEIR political conventions, I'd likely feel the same way.

It happens when you mix religion and politics, I guess, or try to.

During the course of a few workshops and interactions, I heard my religion condemned. In vicious, bold strokes, the panelists and attendees painted a picture of what the party's membership encompassed. They made it clear that as a member of this religion, I was not fit to hold the same political ideologies because I didn't share the same fundamental belief in God. They made it clear that they didn't tolerate diversity of theological ideology. They mocked someone challenging a tenet - in front of 100 people. They mocked another person for daring to label certain actions as religious and cultural bigotry. They insinuated that if one didn't believe the same way he or she was Godless, a liar and a poor excuse for an American.

I left, feeling stunned, shaken to my very core. When the emotion passed, I regained sanity and the realization that it was all just rhetoric and pomp. I've seen the other side do the same thing, though it's never been personal to me.

It made me sick. It made me shrink and wonder what happens to make people so convinced that they are the only people in the world who are right. It made me sick to hear specific attacks made. It made me sick to hear someone call someone else a liar, even if she was a bit eccentric. It made me sick to realize that, as Americans, we still don't embrace agreeing to disagree. We convince ourselves that we MUST recruit everyone to our side of the aisle, even if it means dragging out personal artillery - God, faith, emotion, specific attacks.

I left feeling as if I'd been a voyeur watching the dark characters of night through a lighted window, coming away with a soul stained by the ugliness of it all. I felt as if I had crossed into a secret enclave of rabid eccentrics, and it no longer mattered what political side they claimed. Indeed, it no longer mattered that it was politics at all. What mattered was the lingering feeling that I had entered into one side of the darkened shadows of American politics, faith and government.

Politics is still fascinating to me, but I am sill not anxious to identify with a party, an ideology or a cause. It reaffirmed that I stay safely in my observant neutrality.

Or, I move to Canada.