AP Psychology Taught Me to Not Want to Be a Politician

This week in AP Psychology, we're having political debates. Our teacher separated us into parties: Green Party, Democratic Party, Republican Party, and Libertarian Party (I'm stressing that we didn't get to pick which Party we're in). Thank da lawd I'm in Green Party since I agree with the majority of the things we have to talk about.

Each party received a sheet with seven topics: College tuition, kindergarten, birth control, abortion, spanking, parenting classes, and teratigens (spelled wrong?). We have to try to convince other groups to put a certain amount of money towards each topic.

Dear Lord.

It's a fucking screaming fest.

We argued about college tuition on Monday and couldn't reach a compromise until yesterday. Same with teratigens. Now the Republican Party keeps backing out. Today we talked about birth control and abortion. Green and Democratic Party proposed $20 billion towards birth control and $10 billion towards abortion. The people in the Republican and Libertarian Parties have to disagree because that's what it says to do on their sheet so they proposed something else.

But holy shit.

I can handle differing opinions, but not when everyone is screaming them aloud at once. The girl who talks for the Republican Party said, "We say $0 for abortion because people should know how to control themselves when it comes to sex." I mentioned women who get raped and said, "Are you saying women who have abortions because they were raped can't control themselves?" The whole class got silent and decided to turn to another subject for a few minutes. When we got back to abortion, the Republicans' argument was, "Everything deserves a life" and someone from Libertarian mentioned adoption and the list went on. Those arguments are all good and dandy as long as you can back them up, but they couldn't. After a while I just became quiet and let others argue (I can't even call it a debate). Democratic and Green said put more money towards birth control so therefore, there's an easier access and there will be less unwanted pregnancies and less abortions like the Republicans would like. But the Republicans disagreed with that too and uugggh. My brain hurts. Then we gave them information, attaching our sources to them and they refused to believe our resources and it actually got to the point where I couldn't tell if the speaker for the Republican Party actually believed what she was saying or just said it for the grade (trust me when I said it's usually very easy to tell the difference).

One girl in the Green Party said, "You're a woman. You should want a choice like this."

Republican Party girl: "So just because I'm a woman, I should have a choice on what to do with my body?"

Well... Yeah.

In the end, we compromised on $10 billion for medical reasons but we couldn't get them to give us the money for choice, so therefore they made certain abortions illegal in my classroom's world. Tomorrow the Green and Democratic Parties are going to try to convince them to give money for choice and tell them about rape. I'm also going to say that just because it's illegal doesn't mean it'll go away. Remember what they did in the 70s?

This is due tomorrow and we still have to talk about spanking, parenting classes, and kindergarten. Bleeeehhh.

My teacher doesn't say a word so I have a feeling he's doing an experiment and we're the subjects. We learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Brown Eyes vs Blue Eyes experiment. People were assigned roles and the experimenters wanted to see if people took over those roles. My teacher may also be testing the inoculation effect, which is when beliefs are tested and people are tested on how they defend them.

I seriously don't know how politicians do it though. I can hardly take it while I'm in a classroom.