the politics of indecision

I can never understand how people find politics obvious, or easy; for me it's a struggle. Every time I read a news article from either side I have to sift through so many layers to find the place I think it has come from and from there my response to it. By the time I get to that point I am never sure whether my opinion has been in some way clouded by a moral or other subjective judgement. Am I making the decision based on a true instinct, on what I want to believe, or intellectual and objective observation?
I would love to have the passion to believe in a cause, to take something at face value without cynicism or my default reaction of trying to see the alternative viewpoint. It's painful having to spend so much time sitting on a fence. I wish I could march through the streets with absolute conviction in the slogans I am shouting, to adopt a radical lifestyle or to change my appearance to reflect my allegiances. But here I am, the ultimate woolly liberal, keen to believe in anything that brings people happiness. Immigration, gay marriage, free sweets for all. Unsurprisingly, the hardest extreme for me to relate to is right-wing hysteria, the Mail/Express philosophy that health and safety has gone mad and Diana would solve political correctness. Yet I can't buy into the hippy, communist ideology either, no soft-soaping of reality (and no ethnic skirts). My views have bits of both and bits of neither. Earnestness is equal to humourlessness and even those with opinions close to mine, if given with no hint of a smile, can make me itch to bat for the other side. Lazy sexism can sharpen my feminist polemic but reading a po-faced article in Guardian Women can turn me into a laid-back ladette. I become Newton's Law of Motion, trying to ask unanswerable questions, move goalposts, widen viewpoints. Or, as my parents would have said, argue back. It is instinctive, not premeditated or superior, although it is hard to explain or dissect without appearing that way. I suppose we each believe our own understanding of the world to hold more truth than others. Perhaps my understanding of the world is 'it's not as simple as you think'.