I just read the discussion by Ezra Klein, et al., about the politicization of guns. I have been mulling over the concept of politicization for many years after discussions with people who proclaim to hate politics. My response to them has always been "You may hate politics, but politics is never gone." At that point, I am ready to have a full-blown discussion with my intellectual counterpart, but I am lucky to have a continual discussion that lasts more than a few minutes. And it frustrates me.
It frustrates me because I think this is an important concept that we all need to hash out. In order to understand the idea that democracy, a philosophy that we take for granted way too much, makes us have an opportunity to control our lives through our own decisions. To me, politics is the process to make those decisions. We can hate politics, but we have a responsibility to ensure that we keep that process open to us. Every time we cede our decision-making process to someone else or to some other organization that promises to do our thinking for us, we lose that democracy. Every time we run into a crisis and we hear that it would be better not to talk about it because it would politicize it, we are being led down a path to some form of autocraticism.
We are in danger of ourselves, our laziness, and our inability to face the realities that we must face in order to become a stronger community. We must confront the issues, the people who disagree with us, and those who agree with us, and discuss the shit out of each issue until we are sick of it, but we understand fully the details of the issues. We find out who is lying to us in order to eliminate them from the discussion as their obfuscations are a tool for them to get what they want without caring what is best for all of us. The pursuit of selfishness must be purged to the betterment of the community.
Please politicize everything. It is what makes our community stronger.