ESSAY // Front Line of the Word Wars

The Casualties of the Culture War

by Angel Eduardo

EXCERPT //

There is a great deal of truth to the phrase, “the personal is political.”

Politics is how we move and interact within our larger social, cultural, and national contexts. And we are products of those contexts. We inherit and are influenced by their histories. We are shaped and affected by their current mores. Who we are as people and how we operate in the world always has both a political origin and a political effect. A suffragette may have had an innate temperament that compelled her to demand a voice in society, but she was a suffragette because that voice was legally denied. A slave may both value and fight for liberty as a principle and a virtue in and of itself, but it is the institution of slavery that makes him an abolitionist.

We can’t escape this dynamic. What we do affects others, and what we can and cannot do is the result of political movements that precede us. In that sense, yes, the personal is political.

But when everything must be political, we lose sight of what it means to be a person. //

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