The 2020 elections are coming up relatively soon and the candidates have been tending to make extreme stands against each other which forces the voters to take a strong side against each other with no middle. This is not just bad for the country but could become one of the worst things for it. Imagine the political scale was an actual scale, a weighing scale. Every political parties’ job is to make the country the best it possibly can be, or that’s what they try to do, the way they try to get more people on their side to achieve their goal is either by making themselves seem better or the opposers worse. Let’s get back to the scale, in a country as politically split as America it is hard for each party to get all the power, they keep needing to add to their “scale”, making their party just slightly more intense and reaching harder to reach their goals. As one party “adds more weight” to their scale the other party adds some to theirs, which makes the first party add more weight to theirs. In theory, this seems to be a good thing, making both parties better, but it just makes each side more extreme and further away from each other.

If you go onto any news site you will probably see the same things, mostly either the left or right bashing each other on a nonsensical argument. When people describe all Republicans as Nazis, bigots, and “old racist white dudes” or Democrats as snowflakes, entitled, or “uneducated brats” it doesn’t make you seem like the superior opponent but just someone who has to resort to name-calling to get your point across. If you want to get your point across you need to be respectful and not just block someone out by saying they’re ignorant; it takes both listening and speaking to understand one another.

Violence between parties is something severely overlooked by the media; people have been harassed, blocked from attending events, and even beaten up such as a fourteen-year-old boy in Florida who was beaten up for a Trump-supporting hat last December. Hate crimes like these do not help anybody achieve and just stir more hatred in the mix at both parties. Violence between two American parties has never been a good thing, most notably during the American Civil War which has been known as the deadliest war on American soil. We don’t have to worry about another civil war at the moment but if we keep escalating out violence it could become a possibility.

Politics are a very controversial issue. They used to be something that people could talk about with each other around the dinner table and be forgotten about by dessert, but times have begun to change and differing opinions on who you vote for can split up families, friends, and even make you a social outcast. If someone thinks differently about the future of the country they  just have one goal for them and the people they love to be safe, free, and happy.