Politics and friendship

President Barack Obama won re-election as President of the United States two weeks ago. Countless people - myself included - were delighted at his victory and numerous others were disappointed: a lot of my friends joined me in celebrating his win, but others did not. Throughout 2012, people have been talking amongst themselves about the election, and there's a very good change that friends with differing politics argued; however, I try to be optimistic in thinking that most ordinary people are mature enough to not let politics get in the way of friendship and have moved on from the election by now.

I came across one particular Internet commenter who was enraged by the result. This person, of course, had the right to be angry, but the way in which this individual expressed their anger was extremely disappointing. At first they mentioned that they were boycotting every business and organization they knew to be liberal/progressive/Democratic or have given support to those causes; this is not unreasonable in itself as there's nothing stopping someone from the other side doing the same thing back. However, they didn't stop there.

The person then said that they "hated" anyone with the aforementioned political viewpoints, and that they had cut off all forms of communications with friends who held those stances: every e-mail address, Facebook friend, Twitter friend, phone contact, etc. had been deleted, and they would ignore any messages from one of their now-former friends. By extension, they had no interest in making new friends with those beliefs, either.

There is the possibility that this person was simply venting and being overly ridiculous with no intention of doing any of the things they said, and I hope this was the case. Still, it got me thinking both on how people can lose friendships over politics and how my disagreeing friends and I had handled the recent election. Did we simply stop talking to each other? Are we fuming? Did we go ballistic at one another and end our friendship on a sour note? The answer is no. No needless arguments or resentfulness took place; yes, my friends and I informed ourselves about our respective views, as learning is always good, but we then we moved on.

When people who differ greatly on politics are friends, I think it's best to not talk about politics, but if people do, they should make the effort to understand how they came to form their opinions and discover where they agree with one another rather than fight about it. After all, what is there to gain by anger? If Mr. Obama had lost, exploding in rage and blaming everyone who disagreed with me would have achieved nothing except lose friends; similarly, if my response to his victory beyond a celebration was to mock friends who didn't support him, I would have had the same result. Bad sportsmanship either way is a poor course of action.

Unless the disagreement stems from one person holding prejudiced views (my friends are not bigots, so this isn't an issue), politics should not spoil a good friendship. The same applies for not allowing them to split up families.