Get on a bike, pedal and shut up
Let the pundits analyze politics.
The other day, the topic of gerrymandering (what a word, eh?) came up at work. Ohio’s unfortunate, theatric politics were recently spotlighted in a New Yorker piece that has some people abuzz.
The conversation was like post-Thanksgiving dinners with family you haven’t seen in a while. The dishes are mostly off the table and the sensible people are in another room playing a board game or something. The rest of us are still sitting around the table, imbibing and prescribing the world’s issues.
If you’re me, you’re sitting there, observing. Sometimes you inject a one-liner here or laugh at a quip. If I’m lucky one of those quips will come from me. Usually not though.
That’s what it was like, except this conversation (discussion? debate? musing?) took place on the inter-company messaging platform. So kinda like the “professional” social media.
As I leaned back and witnessed the regurgitation of pundit talking points, witty zings here and there and the throwing around of “Atlas Shrugged” quotations, I found myself getting a strong urge to kick something. I’m not an angry person, but analyzing politics is like a baby playing with scissors — messy. And unless you’re in a setting in which the objective is to learn or truly listen, no one ever gets anywhere debating why politicians do what they do. The conversation spirals and spirals until people on each side fold their arms in disgust and stare into their wine glasses in despair.
That’s why my go-to move when this happens is to get up from the table at a point where the discussion has died down. The anarchist of the room has thrown in Nietzsche quote and the others are contemplating the words in bewildered silence.
I get up, go to wherever the nearest bottle of alcohol is, fill up my vessel and sit back down. And then I say something like, “Politics suck. This is why I ride bikes and shut up. They usually don’t steer me wrong.”
Works like a charm. Debate done. Back to the real world with something we can all understand.
Seriously though, every time you get the urge to analyze politics, you should just get on a bike, pedal and shut up. Politics really do suck most times, so why not give the established mechanisms of power a middle finger and salute your own mechanisms of power (your own two legs)?