Life isn’t simple, in fact it can be darned complicated!

Deciding national policies that affect nearly 70 million people is REALLY complicated.
Which means that getting it perfectly right is essentially impossible and will almost never involve simplistic solutions. Any decision made by Government has a myriad of knock-on effects, many unforeseen (at least by the decision makers).

We have to be able to hold multiple ideas in our heads and find a path through them that doesn’t involve simply believing what it suits us to believe, and then pretending that it's ok for any opposing thought or idea to be ignored or closed-down.

For example, it’s possible to believe that Trump was the President most dangerously unfit for that office ever, while also believing that the self-righteous censorship of woke social justice corporations like Google, Twitter & Facebook, needs to be opposed.
 
It’s possible to believe that Covid is a new and dangerous virus that needs to be tamed and the vulnerable groups shielded, while also believing that the economic, medical and social downsides of these lockdowns will be seen in the future to have done more damage overall than Covid itself.

Things which are portrayed by panicky incompetent politicians and ideological journalists as simplistic, i.e. this thing good, that thing bad, are rarely that simple.
They are not all or nothing, mutually exclusive choices.

We don’t have to pick one or the other and then see who can shout loudest or enforce their view on others in the most draconian way.
We have to deal simultaneously with two, and often more, difficult issues and find a path that maximises the best and avoids the worst outcomes of them all.

We also have to judge whether the imperative needs of today outweigh or are outweighed by the less tangible but equally important needs of tomorrow, or next year, or next decade.
And that can be the hardest judgement of all.

It doesn’t matter whether we are young or old.
Together we are a continuous living conduit between the past and the future and we need to treat each other, as well as previous generations and future generations, with the respect that this realisation demands.
 
Self-righteous ideological warfare will not achieve anything good because those on the side that wins become tyrants and those on the side that loses become slaves.
 
We can do better than that; but we have to want to, and then be bothered to make the effort, because it won’t be easy.