On the difference between action and agent

It's Election Day here in the US, a "holiday" held annually on the first Tuesday of every November. For those who haven't noticed (and I would not fault you if you didn't), our national politics have lately been quite polarized. More than perhaps at any time in my life, there seems to be a kind of vitriol and visceral anger just below the surface of much contemporary discussion, even on topics only remotely related to politics.

Why this is I cannot say, but its result appears to be the polarization not only of political ideas, but also of the respective people who hold political views of any kind. And while the former may be inevitable--that there are usually multiple sides to and interpretations of every issue--the latter is perhaps not, because an action or idea is not the same as the thing that does the act or conceives of the idea. As the Dalai Lama writes in "Ethics For The New Millennium" (1999):

"When we do something negative, we are capable of recognizing the difference between ourselves and the negative act. But we often fail to separate action and agent when it comes to others. This shows us how unreliable is even apparently justified anger" (pp. 96-97).

Read the comment section of almost any news story from an online paper today, and you will probably see not only a substantive debate over ideas, but also attacks of varying degrees against people who hold them; for example, an advocate of single-payer healthcare becomes, in the eyes of some, a socialist-taker-moocher-leftist-traitor, and a global-warming denier an ignorant-uncaring-regressive-right-wing-tea-party-nutcase. Not one of these labels include "human," which I assume all commenters are, and few seem interested in dissembling a person's ideas from who they actually are. We are thus left not only with divided politics (which has been historically normal and even healthy in most democracies and republics), but also a divided sense of who warrants the basic respect afforded to people in general. So while a difference of opinion and world-view is perhaps a good thing for a country, it becomes less useful when we forget that those with whom we disagree are people too, and are more than the sum of the ideas they have.