From the desk

Politics always get people riled up.

Friends are labelled either Republican or Democrat, families are split down the middle and co-workers begin to look at each other contemptuously upon realizing that two people can hold opposing views.

Every four years, it seems almost as if the United States splits in two. Slashing at each other’s throats with words of malice, it is utterly surprising that any of us can pick ourselves up on a daily basis and work as a nation next to that “liberal tree-hugger” or “conservative Bible-thumper.”

It seems as if people have just gotten caught up in an unjustified loyalty to a political party that hasn’t really ever given them anything in return.

Ideally, we should cast away labels and begin to think for ourselves.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, a linguist and anthropologist, knew the meaning that labels and words had on a person’s perceptions of the world. According to his “Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis,” what we believe is limited by the language in which we think and speak. In other words, the labels that we give objects or behaviors become engraved in our minds so much so that we can only identify these things as being what we originally labeled them.

John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, understood this when he urged Americans to cast off the political candidate labels and seek the correct decision.

“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer,” he once said. “Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

Whether that is taking an incumbent president and voting him back into office or taking an opposing candidate and giving him a shot at fixing this nation remains to be unseen.

After all of the hoopla and excitement of the 2012 presidential election is behind us, we must realize that progress will probably not be made for quite a bit of time, regardless of the president.