I like to write about my hobbies. I have two big ones (and really need a life besides them). I love politics and I love anime. The two have relatively little to do with each other. Since anime is written in Japan, it is almost never written with the ins and outs of American government in mind. However, there are some lessons that can be universally applied.

One anime that I recently finished (and love to all the characters' deaths) is called Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, or When the Cicadas Cry. Now, before I go on to connect horror anime with politics, I must ask any people who think they might see this anime to please leave the room because it is impossible to say anything about it without spoiling something. I'll give you time.

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Are we good? Great.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is divided into small, four-or-so-episode-long stories that detail six characters living in the small town of Hinamizawa. The focus of this anime is on trust and paranoia, and although each story involves the same characters, it is common that most of the characters are killed at the end of each story.

For instance, in the first arc, the main character, Keiichi notices that two of his friends are trying to kill him through a few different means. What start out as thinly-veiled threats ("I'd hate for you to be absent tomorrow.") turn into a needle buried in some food they give him, culminating in them both assaulting him and trying to drug him using a syringe. At this point, Keiichi manages to break away, killing both of them with a baseball bat, and runs away. He later calls the police from a phone booth only to be interrupted in the middle by his own suicide attempt to scratch through his own throat. He dies a day later.

Sounds gruesome, doesn't it? So ultimately, what is the point? Not even Keiichi knows. He asks their corpses before running away, "Why?? What was all of this for??" He dies without getting an answer, but later, we (the audience) do.

Ultimately, the purpose was.... self-fulfilling prophecy, of a sort. His friends were never trying to kill him. Keiichi became afraid because of a murder streak in that village that occured every year on the same day (indeed, the most recent murder had occurred the day before his friends started threatening him), and that fear had spiraled into paranoia, to the point that he hallucinated both the needle (tabasco  sauce mixed into the food) and the syringe (really a magic marker) and killed both his friends needlessly, then promptly killing himself, which is a symptom of the paranoia (Hinamizawa syndrome, a fictional disease) he suffered.

So what's the lesson? We create our own bogeymen, and ultimately, the only ones who can claw out our throats are ourselves.

Right now, I'm worried that the entire Democratic party is suffering from a case of Hinamizawa syndrome (The only thing scarier than one person with it is a lot of people with it at once). We are running around chasing each other with metal bats, creating our own conspiracy theories as to who is out to betray us, but here's the thing: We're all nakama!  We're all looking to the same thing! We're all in the same boat! If one of those bats hits the boat hard enough, though, it springs a leak, and then we all sink.

No one who isn't in the boat can make it sink. The Republicans can't do that, terrorists can't do that, heck, the Green party can't do that! This is the thing that all Democrats need to remember. You don't need to get rid of your bat. Keep it with you, if you want, for crying out loud, the bigger, the better. Just use it to row instead of beating your comrades.

In the anime, there ultimately was a conspiracy to thwart, but no one was looking in the right direction because they were too busy killing each other. Ultimately, the anime does have a happy ending, once the characters manage to overcome the paranoia, but I'm worried that we'll wind up stuck in one of the bad endings where everyone kills each other.

Democrats have a choice now. We can acknowledge our fears on both sides and overcome them (Neither Obama supporters nor Clinton supporters are conspiring to throw the election to the Republicans). Or we can wander through the dead-end timelines until we ultimately claw out our own throats.

So, what's it gonna be?