A certain friend of mine loves to tease me about my stance on political parties. While he tends to agree with me on many issues, he seems to find it childish that I don't belong to the Democratic Party. I feel the opposite way. I feel that belonging to any political party is about as childish as it gets.
Political parties are nothing more than a slightly more mature version of the childhood cliques we all had when we were in school. The instinct to seek out comradery among like-minded people is a perfectly natural one. The problem is, it wasn't good enough to just have a group of people you could talk to and associate yourself with, but it was almost mandatory to demonize the other cliques. Anyone different from you was automatically less human, and thus worthy of ridicule. Most of us outgrew that phase. Why can't we outgrow political parties?
Now let me be very clear. I'm not talking exclusively about Democrats and Republicans, so wipe the smirk off your face, Green Partiers and Tea Partiers. I'm also not saying that you shouldn't vote for a candidate from a certain party. What I'm saying is that you should vote based on the human being and not the letter next to the candidate's name. It seems like a simple enough concept, but for some reason it's a difficult one for many Americans to grasp.
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