Recently I discovered an article that detailed comments made by GOP staffer Elizabeth Lauten about the President’s daughters, Sasha and Malia Obama.

Lauten said the Obama sisters should “show a little class,” in relation to the outfits that they were wearing at the annual turkey pardoning. Now this in and of itself is bad enough, but Lauten also said, “Then again your mother and father don’t respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter, so I’m guessing you’re coming up a little short in the ‘good role model’ department.”

It was this quote that reminded me that most discussions today seem to lack any nuance. Whether or not you agree with the politics of President Obama, you can’t argue that he’s not a good role model. The man was raised by a single parent and is a Harvard law graduate. But in today’s simplified discussions, there needs to be a good and a bad guy.

This is even more apparent in the wake of the decision made by the grand jury in Ferguson, Mo. not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. The argument has been boiled down to whether you are for or against the police.

But almost all issues are more complex than the plot of “Star Wars.” Rarely are there ever good guys and bad guys, because issues are almost always far more complicated than that. However, we like to create false dichotomies so that we can cast someone as the villain and cement the fact that we are on the right side of an issue.

And this is what leads us to being devout in our beliefs, and to our dismissal of anyone who disagrees with us.

One of my better friends in high school was a bad guy. He was a womanizer, and a lazy prick. That said though, I had always enjoyed talking to the guy, and his personal beliefs and actions didn’t affect my personal experience with the guy.

Another one of my teachers had some pretty major ethical allegations raised against him. But he was a mentor to me, and nothing  he had ever done to help me is changed because of said allegations.

The most extreme example of this lack of complexity came about during the McCarthyism of the 1950s where anyone who thought that maybe communists weren’t so bad was automatically accused of being a communist that hated America. This lack of open-mindedness and refusal to see complexity led to the wrongful imprisonment of many individuals.

All of our conversations today seem to boil down to the good guys versus the bad guys, with no grey area in between. Whether it be healthcare or Ferguson, all the debate inevitably comes down to the bad guys versus the good guys.

Hate festers in our inability to acknowledge the fact that a person is more than just their political or religious beliefs, or their actions.

Alex Bertsch is the opinion editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected].