Why politics?
I get it – a lot of people, including my old self, believe that politics is a waste of time, and for some good reasons. I used to think that ethics and politics were too different, too estranged, and that I couldn't hope to use my knowledge of one to speak in the other. I think that's why a lot of people are hesitant to even break the ice in that department, because they think it's just too big of an issue.
And that's fine to think. Truly, it is an enormous topic, and not one that just anyone should tread on.
On the flipside, you have people like the millennial generation as a whole, who are too confident that they have politics figured out and pay no heed to their own mortality and lack of experience. People who try to use “old” as an insult.
But when I started to listen to conservatives speaking, that changed for me. Suddenly it wasn't all ethics and emotions and crying – it was logical, reasonable, understandable, and truths that were hard to swallow, but that we need to hear. And I started to understand.
Once, back when I was married, my dad came over to visit me while my husband was at work. This was before I had started paying attention, and I liked a lot of very liberal TV-shows. I was recently out of high school, and I watched a lot of John Oliver (who is, admittedly, a very funny guy – or at least has very clever writers).
Stuff he had said on his show made a lot of sense in my head and he was funny, and so to impress my dad I thought I'd pull up a political commentator. I was really sad when he started arguing with the things Oliver said. I pushed back with whatever I could think of.
One of the episodes was about Standardized Tests in high schools, and how the people who were hired to grade them were asked to start seeing more of them as certain grades. “You need to start to learn to see more essays as a four, as a three.” That outraged Oliver and he started talking about how unfair that was to school systems where most students do well. Why would a child in one school district earn an A for the same work another would earn a C for?
But my dad explained it to me, and thank God because I was about to go through the rest of my life not understanding that basic concept.
We compete for jobs. We compete for housing and resources with other human beings. At the end of the day, even if fifty people apply for one job, the best candidate will get it. Even if everyone has an ability to perform a job, only the one who is most experienced will earn the opportunity.
Grades aren't intended to indicate the quality of work – they're intended to rank the students from best to worst. That's why when our teachers in school would “grade on a curve” it could be a really good thing or a really bad thing; if everyone did poorly, at least there will be some people who got an A. If everyone did well, our teachers wouldn't grade on a curve because that would set the lowest scores up for failure.
My high school used to rank students by their GPA. Test scores are simply meant to reflect that ranking, and prepare us for competing with each other in the real world, where even if everyone knows what they're doing, only one of us gets the job.
That's when I realized my dad is seriously smart, and maybe everything isn't always an outrage. That's when I realized that these people on the television were playing with things they didn't always understand, and that I could understand them even though I was small. And the day I realized John Oliver was a comedian. Not a politician.