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Regardless of how fluidly it’s perceived in terms of its strength, however, friendship is important to nearly everyone. Aside from a few exceptions, someone without any friends to rely on is in a sorry state.

It’s for this reason that university students need to pay close attention to how they treat their friends. All of the drama in high school can still linger on to the college environment if it’s allowed to survive. The stresses of being on a higher education campus can take a strong toll on how students see each other. One of these stresses, and perhaps one of the most overlooked, is politics.

I visited a General Assembly meeting of HUSC last week in which there was a debate concerning funding to send five student leaders to a student organization conference in Nashville. The discussion became very heated. That’s fine-heated debates are often fun to listen to and participate in.

What isn’t fun, and what can seriously threaten friendships, is when one side or both sides allow the wall between personal emotional stake and objective debate to slip. This causes friendships themselves to come under fire, when the idea of friendship between two opposite debating teams should never come into question. It should remain separate, safe, and apart from the issue being discussed.

Camaraderie can be damaged through many causes, and many of them are valid ones, but politics should never influence how you see another human being as a person. Disagreement on a political issue such as funding is no reason to dissolve a friendship. They need to be kept separate in order to keep things moving smoothly and objectively.

Beyond keeping order in a debate by staying relatively emotionally distant from the argument, it isn’t worth it to become angered and upset. Losing arguments is part of the risk one takes when entering an argument in the first place, and being embroiled and personally offended by the opposing party does nobody any good. All it does is cause bitterness and anger towards one another, and to be quite honest there’s enough of that in the world already.

Political affiliations can affect how people see one another in a negative light, too. It’s a very real human instinct to want to bond together more strongly with someone who is similar to them in the most important ways.

But this shouldn’t imply an exclusionary attitude towards those people on different sides of the leftčright spectrum. It is conceivable that a staunch liberal can get along with a strongly conservative person, and vice versa. This climate of us vs. them needs to stop. All it does is create divisions between intelligent, rational, admirable human beings for no other reason than what they believe politically.

These divisions needn’t be there, and they’re harmful to those who participate in spreading them, as well as those who are split from those they used to care about.

So be aware of your own prejudices, and do your best to take a good hard look at what you really think of those who see the world differently than you. If more liberals and conservatives compromised with one another and let the mudslinging and wild accusations stop, they might find themselves richer for it.