Today’s politics is all about showing to the public why the other party is wrong, not why your party is right. It seems like politicians, both state and national, spend more time blaming the opposite party for whatever failures have occurred than they do trying to right them. Early on Oct. 13 Senate Republicans held an exclusive meeting to talk about the political situation that’s been going on for the past 12 days. Let’s take a sneak peek into what their private meeting might look like:

“So, how’s y’all’s 12 days off been?” Senator 1 asks.

“Quite well, I did a lot of golfing on the Congressional golf course and used my pay to take an impromptu trip to Hawaii!” Senator 2 replies.

Now a Republican Senator with a decent heart poses the question of, “Shouldn’t we be focusing on fixing the shutdown, since it’s hurting people throughout the nation and is partly our fault since we weren’t willing to compromise?”

This is met with widespread criticism. Senator 1 drowns out the rest and says simply, “Son, this entire situation is Mr. Obama’s fault. Despite the fact that our party is responsible for this, we need to reaffirm that Barack brought this on us and that he isn’t doing his job. Disregard the multiple attempts he’s made at ending this and having bipartisan talks. Don’t bring those up. Just stick with the political finger-pointing and don’t actually try to get anything done. If you do, you’ll definitely be ostracized from the rest of us. And you don’t want that, now do ya, kid?”

Now before we think about just how unfortunate this situation is, lets fly through Capitol Hill and take a look into another private meeting room, this time filled with Senate Democrats. Similar niceties are exchanged at the beginning, and the same question comes up of, “shouldn’t we be doing something about this?”

Again, the answer is “Not really, because we’ve done all that we can. The Republicans are entirely at fault here, they’ve been strong-arming us into doing something we don’t want, so now we have to hold our ground no matter the consequences. So let’s stay here, share breakfast and catch up before we go to our press conferences and berate the Republican party for being the ones holding back American progress.”

What we can see is that today’s politicians are complacent blaming the other party, because it provides job security for them. If they can show that the other party is acting out of line and that their party is more reasonable, then they promote themselves and encourage people to reelect them. But where is the morality in this? Where is the sanctity of human character? These people were originally elected for a reason: to lead the country and to make decisions that would reflect the will of the people. Most assuredly, they are not doing this. We need to end this finger-pointing; we need to end this never ending game of blame and shame. Instead, these politicians need to own up to making a few mistakes here and there, swallow some pride now and again, and be productive in a bipartisan, cooperative manner.