Jeez man what do you want a metal or something? Shut up already!

I've rounded a corner. Not gone around it, but rounded it off so I won't catch myself on it again. That pointy protrusion was partisanship. Do you know the difference between knowledge and wisdom? Knowledge is knowing a thing. Wisdom is understanding it. The dust hasn't finished settling, but I have finally internalized my longstanding belief that political labels are counterproductive. At last I've put my finger on why. Democrat and republican I get--those descriptors are shorthand for "affiliated with this party". But "liberal" and "conservative" --those aren't nouns. They're adjectives. Saying "those liberals" or "he's a conservative" reduces people to a mere portion of who they are, at best. At worst it pastes over who they are with an imaginary caricature that serves no purpose other than further dividing and alienating an already divided and alienated people. For most of my life I've identified as A liberal. And part of what A liberal does is support other liberals and square off against non-liberals. Over the past several years I've encountered numerous people who hold conservative beliefs and are all around decent individuals. This incongruity coexisted with my identity as A liberal until I began to encounter more and more people who hold liberal beliefs and are basically rotten people to anyone who isn't also a liberal--and for reasons that are hypocritical, myopic and logically unsound. In other words, no set of character traits in endemic to either group. There are good people and shitty people represented in both demographics. There is no correlation between political views and personal character. From there is was a short but painstaking step to really recognize that it isn't the other party that's the enemy. It's the act of objectifying people by conflating what they believe with who they are. A mistake I will make every effort to avoid making again. There's an expression I'm fond of: small change, big difference. (Just ask a barber if you don't believe me.) This small adjustment to my schema has profoundly altered my perspective. It has allowed me to reconcile my fondness for people whose political ideologies I don't subscribe to, and my disdain for people whose political ideologies mirror my own. The ideology is incidental to the equation. The deciding factors are sensibility and temperament. I either find someone to be pleasant, open-minded, honest and logically consistent, or I don't. Period. And I will never again refer to a person as A liberal or A conservative. Those labels deserve the same fate as our friend depicted in the desert. If it was relevant, I would say "a person of liberal persuasion" or "someone with conservative ideologies". Beliefs mean nothing by themselves--it's what is done with them that matters. It's unlikely that a person's beliefs would be accurately encompassed by a single word anyway, and even less so as they change over time. Mine certainly have. Simple. Obvious. Vapid even. Not sure why it took me so long to puzzle this out. But I'll be damned if it hasn't changed my life. --SaintRanger (Former Liberal and current person who holds generally liberal and some conservative views, but who prizes kindness and civility above all.)