I was watching The Sopranos the other day (S5 Ep10) and Tony was losing his mind over a news channel coverage of Islamic terrorists trying to potentially sneak nuclear weaponry on unchecked cargo. This news unsettles Tony, and he tells his wiseguys at the strip club about the severe gravity of the matter, for which Georgie Santorelli tells him to “live for today”, angering Tony to the point that he beats him to death with a cash register. Paulie visits Tony afterwards and tells him, “This is why I don’t usually talk politics…”

Flash forward 18 years later from when that episode aired, and I can probably envision this exact encounter still happening. One man shares their opinion on politics, another tries to console the mood with harmless platitudes, and suddenly the tension escalates to shouting and (sometimes) to blows! 

The internet in its fancy to be the great unifier for humanity turns into a cog in the machine of human tribalism and the need for identity, where people to turn to safe spaces and echo chambers to assure their opinion is the right one, and God forbid two “tribes” find themselves speaking on their opinion, suddenly everything they’re reinforced themselves to believe is spouted back at one another.

The recent events of Roe v. Wade‘s overturn and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have had the masses stirring for a while and engaging in heavy political discourse to the point one can’t escape unless they did away with TV & social media altogether (which many probably have).

Now, I’ve always been one to have an interest in politics, for a number of reasons. 

The number one reason, trite as it seems, was because I was a huge history buff in school. It was really the only subject that ever stuck in my head. Math and science were always too confusing and, believe it or not, literature always bored me. History was always easy, “x” people did “y” thing because of “z”.

The number two reason was the mere act of activism was empowering. Marching on Washington, voting, taking part in town meetings and committees and charity always felt like I was a part of something larger than myself and so it felt good.

Number three reason was because in politics you could openly slander people without much repercussion and that always fascinated and delighted me. I mean, seriously, guys like Chris Christie and Ted Cruz provide a boundless supply of comedic material.

Number four was my friend circle when I was young and even now as an adult is filled with people with the same keen upkeep on politics as me and so we tend to speak on it from time to time and make for (usually) insightful conversations.

Stepping out of those friend circles, however, often met a world of repercussions and setbacks and misunderstandings and non-sequiturs, which is increasingly frustrating! And a lot of times, these hopeless conversations happen with strangers, people who we shouldn’t care what they think and they shouldn’t care what we think, and yet here we are in this tense bubble of tumultuous political discourse. 

That’s been the experience in my case, and I do believe it’s the case for many others, and when it’s election years or there’s some historical event happening somewhere in the world affecting millions of people, that takes a lot of wear & tear on the mind over a time – to the point that politics is simply too exhausting to even practice anymore.

And I’d like to take relief in the idea that practicing politics was once a more civil discourse, but I’d be sugarcoating the truth! Politics was never civil. In America, we used to duel each other over our political differences, and when dueling was banned, it came to riots and protests. Monks in Tibet set themselves on fire. The French were beheading as many dissenters as physically possible. 

Sure, people “back in the old days” did speak more fluently and eloquently when it came to politics, at least no politician today speaks quite like how Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King did. Two of which were shot, to further my point…

When speaking upon matters that affect so many lives, often to the point of life & death or affecting the very way one lives their life, it’s not really a question of “why” people get so tense about it, and more a question of what do we do about it?

And should we include it in our novels?

My answer would be: yes. But it does vary.

Writing a memoir or nonfiction piece, politics would be naive to exclude. It’s real life, it happened, and the events and facts and political opinions of the time don’t go away. Does it need to be included in fiction? Will writing political thrillers really make a change in the way we practice politics?

If your goal is to try and unite people under a cause and make them see things from a certain point of you, well your motivations are admirable, but most likely are going to miss the mark, at least for fiction anyhow.

A lot of fiction writing goes awry, especially with dystopian or political thriller-themed novels that have their own wonky explanations of politics that are just begging to be ripped apart. These usually come as a result of ill-researched approaches to politics or failures to even consider the “other side” of an argument.

However, that being said, communication will always be the number one key to understanding one another.

Communication is key to success, Lou Bloom, Nightcrawler – YouTube

Literature has never been shy on modern issues and often, it’s been the lens in which we view a given time period based on how people wrote on the ideas of their time, and 200 years from now people could read the literature of day and have a firmer understanding of what the beginning of “the information age” was like or how people fared during the “war on terror”, the “war on drugs”, the “great resignation”, and the thousands of other events that we come to experience in our 100 years on earth.

“It takes education, to change your reputation” as Chris Rene said in his bars in “Young Homie”, and that really couldn’t be more true. We need to constantly learn, form, and shape our opinions. We have to do the hardest thing, which is to understand those of differing opinions and truly see things the way they see it, or else we will forever be getting nowhere, constantly split 50/50 on issues leaving governments to merely do as they please regardless of the masses because the masses can’t reach a decision.

Democracy was created for a “majority rules” system, but so long as every crowd is 50% divided on an issue, there is no majority. 

“A house divided against itself cannot stand”, there’s a reason both Jesus and Abraham Lincoln are famous for this quote.

Reading will always enhance our learning and our perspectives, whether fiction or nonfiction. Nonfiction will often fill those educational needs, but fiction allows us to empathize and understand the motivations and ideals in perhaps a new way that we hadn’t considered before and eliminating those contentious environments.

Conversely, certain books can always just get “lumped together” with ideas of a particular movement that people can just ignore anyway because “it doesn’t align with my beliefs, so it hurts my feelings” or something along those lines – I’m paraphrasing. That’s a different topic altogether.

If you’re scared your book may “offend” or “get on somebody’s nerves”, I wouldn’t sweat it. There’s plenty of people, ideas, concepts, and trends that do that already, you’ll never please everybody as much as you may want that 100% approval on your book. No one can judge you for speaking your truth, because that’s yours and yours alone. To silence that would be to silence free speech, which is also a different topic, but nonetheless the truth of the matter.

Do not be shy, do not be timid. Find your voice and write what you’re passionate about. Your writing will only suffer if it’s constantly brown-nosing and catering to the opinions of others, and thus bogged down in a heap of failed novels whose message was lost beneath the veneer of people-pleasing. You don’t write to be a copy of other people’s sentiments; you write to be you.