This might explain it

I hate watching political debates. Loathe it. Political debates make me endlessly miserable.

Not because I think they’re all fakes and crooks, because I don’t. I think most of them honestly want to do their best by their country. Not because I think they’re liars, though it’s pretty damned obvious that they’re selective in their choice of facts, and a certain amount of (deliberate? inadvertent?) fudging goes on. It bugs me that never once in a debate do you hear someone say, “You know, that’s a good point. Now, I think you need to put more emphasis on this, or you’ve overlooked that, but that one point there? Nicely put!”

(You’re laughing? Why? Why? Why the hell not? Why must debate be entirely about undermining the other guy? How does it weaken you to admit the other guy’s good idea — and then improve it?)

But the real reason that I hate debates, I realized earlier today, is that they’re so much like my daily life… except I can’t fix it. When I see one person shouting over top of the other one (and may I here note that in my admittedly restricted experience, Canadian debates are way worse than American for this) The Daycare Lady in me is desperate to start issuing edicts: “Play fair! Take turns! No name-calling! Stop shouting!”

There is no fun at all in helplessly watching adults employ the same conflict-resolution “strategies” — shouting, interrupting, rudeness — that I spend my life trying to train out of toddlers. No fun at all.

Nor do I learn anything from their aggressive verbiage… except that maybe they all need remedial time with their Daycare Lady. Sigh.