Political values: morals, since political values roughly boil down to your conceptions of justice and what is right and wrong.

To me, this is the defining aspect of any person, and the kinds of people I prefer tend to be those who can't walk into a room without their political awareness preceding them. All I really care about is whether someone is a good person, but I've increasingly had to admit that, in my mind, "good" is a highly politicized concept. I've had many an acquaintance, and even dear friends I loved, with whom I've parted ways, unable to reconcile the lovely person with a political value set that makes my stomach turn. In the end, I have to really respect someone's politics and integrity to be close to them, and I think that's somewhat unusual in our increasingly depoliticized world. I have very little time or patience for people whose range of concerns don't in some way extend beyond themselves. It's not even that I require that those close to me agree with me - but - they must bother to care!

The fact that I've given up friendship for politics makes it all the stranger to me that I get sucked into the poetry of Matthew Arnold - now, if ever there was someone who I thought was politically naive and guilty of sporting bourgeoisie blinders, it'd be him (oh yes, sweetness and light will solve everything...?). Nonetheless, living in the last stanza of "Dover Beach" has been what's keeping me sane of late. Could this mean I actually care more about art than politics? I think it's just the way the right words can lodge inside you.

" Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

See? It's a horrible and insular view - and too f**king apt. At least I still prefer the turn of Koyczan's pen -
"You have to care about the world
Because it doesn't care about you."

Politics is the mathematics of the heart, but language is the concrete realization of its abstract equations.