Our biggest problem is that we care to much about every issue.(Vít Luštinec, Wikimedia Commons)

You may tell me the media is the biggest problem, or John Boehner, or that socialist Muslim we should never have elected in the first place. I would tell you there is a much larger, wide spread problem that has infected each of those individuals and talking heads you dislike so much at MSNBC. Our problem is that we all care too much.

There is nothing wrong with being passionate about social issues and there is nothing wrong with being passionate about fiscal issues. The problem we have as a nation is that we all decided we were passionate about both.

It used to be that if you were a conservative, you were passionate about fiscal issues and you cared less about social ones. Sure you cared about things like abortion and welfare but you were willing to bend on them if it allowed you to gain the upper hand in the fiscal debate. It used to be that if you were a liberal, you were passionate about social issues and you left the debate about fiscal issues to those who cared more about them than you.

This idea of “who cares” is not one meant to demean what other people find important. It is one that signals  someone else might understand more about a subject than we do so we are willing to give more than we take in a negotiation. We used to be a nation that was capable of compromise because we didn’t feel we were surrendering a part of our moral code every time we did so.

How could we ever compromise in today’s political atmosphere? As people who care about politics we are told we have to have an opinion about everything. As a political journalist I am not supposed to tell you I’m passionate about tax structure and balancing a budget and for the most part willing to compromise about social issues, or vice-versa.

We live in an era of outrage. We are required to be angry any time a bill passes that we don’t agree with 100 percent. Newsflash: nothing has ever passed that you agreed with 100 percent. The problem is that we used to be a group of people, a nation, where that didn’t tear us apart.

Thirty years ago, if I cared most about social issues, I could have given in to slightly lower taxes as long as you bent accordingly on Social Security benefits. These days, I’m not allowed to bend on anything. I am required to care 100 percent about every single issue.

If I lose your readership because of this next statement, I thank you for your time with me. I don’t care 100 percent about every issue. I may have an opinion about most things that happen, but it is humanly impossible for every one of them to be the most important to me. We live in a world where the impossible is demanded of those we elect and those who sit behind the news desk. This is not to say those individuals are innocent in any way, they have created a sense of indignation that we have perpetuated.

I keep coming back to this idea of outrage. How our need to condemn everyone else for any sort of compromise has created a poisoned political world. We sit on our couches, at our dinner tables, in disbelief that our democratic congressman could ever accept lower taxes, that our conservative senator could ever vote to legalize same-sex marriage.

This is not a column written to tell you that its “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” or to convince you we should lower the corporate tax rate. It is a column written because I care about our political world. It is a column written to make one request of you, if you truly want to see that political world start working again.That one request is simple, and yet near as impossible as what we ask of our elected officials. I simply ask you to stop caring so much. We used to live in a world where we admitted certain things mattered more to us than others. That is what made this country work; it was a nation where enough people cared about each thing, not every thing.

So as we head into summer, I ask you, and myself, to regain a willingness to look at an issue someone else is passionate about and simply ask, “who cares?".

Reach Contributor Calum Hayes here; follow him here.