By Mike Byrne 

With the election season coming up, social media is becoming riddled with political memes depicting Republicans and Democrats as idiots. I am asking those of you who are posting these to please stop. First, 95 percent of them are not funny. Second, and more importantly, they disingenuously represent an entire population.

There is nothing wrong with using humor to criticize politics, but these memes are trying to fuel the fire of one group hating another. They do not try to deconstruct any facet of politics, they merely succeed in keeping anyone who views them and agrees with them in a mental cage, uninterested in trying to understand the rationale of the other side.

In the United States, we have created an “us vs. them” political disposition. Our two-party system probably does not help this, as it continually pits two groups against one another. Maybe if we had multiplicity of major political groups the discussion would become more open and less like a rat race.

Regardless, our political field is in need of a dose of empathy. I say that with full awareness of the statement’s borderline unbearable sentimentality. I do not think we should stop making scathing political comedy, but I do think the conversation could use perspective. Is empathy a panacea for our political woes? Not at all, but I am pretty sure that it could not hurt.

We need to start seeing those we disagree with as fully formed humans instead of manifestations of ideas. It is easy to view someone like a Bernie Sanders supporter as a representation of what you think has gone wrong with America. You can complain that these people are naïve and wrongheaded, or that they do not care about other people’s earnings. But what you are doing is homogenizing an entire group and not looking at what would cause someone’s wish for a political revolution.

The same exact thing can be said about supporters of someone like Marco Rubio. You can say they are not open-minded and do not care about other people, but the truth is this is not accurate. It is so easy for us to imagine every Republican or every Democrat as part of a monolith. We like to think that they all share the same beliefs for the same reasons because it makes them easier to attack. But the truth is that each individual has his or her own experiences that lead to ideas.

Now, I acknowledge political motives of presidential candidates, but on some level I think that is a different conversation. Voters do not necessarily share the same desire for power.

It is impossible to take every individual and try to understand why he or she believe the things he or she does. But we can still recognize the fact that people who support the candidates from the other side of the aisle have motives that are far from evil. And in admitting that people’s ideals, more often than not, come from a place of good-naturedness we will create a political landscape more conducive to conversation between parties. We will create a better country.

Polarization has gotten much worse in the United States in recent years. We have friends who only share our political beliefs and we feel animosity towards the other party so much more now than ever before. It is this increasing division that causes such hostility between people of differing viewpoints.

Empathy is not easy. It is looking at someone who you fundamentally might disagree with and saying, “I’m going to try to understand where you are coming from.” But if we can succeed in doing so, would we not get so much more done? It is so much harder to try to work with someone whom you feel programmed to hate. I am not asking for us to hold each other’s hands and sing “Kumbaya.” I am just asking that we start trying to understand where people get their ideals and political values from so we can have a more understanding discussion.