11-11-2016, 08:25 AM
(11-11-2016, 01:48 AM)taramarie Wrote: What is the answer of what to replace the current hostile environment? Here have been a few suggestions by someone that i know. A fellow millennial. I totally agree with this list.
"1. If they are complete strangers and you don't have some type of skill-set in persuading people (negotiator, educator on related topics, etc) I would not even bother. Frankly, it takes a lot of patience that I don't see in many people. If you view the person you are trying to persuade as an adversary, there is a good chance that things will go south by the end of the exchange.
The rest of these are assuming you have some type of relationship to the person, even if you are just acquaintances. I also think that they mainly work with in-person interactions. For the specific situation you gave, I think social media is a horrible mismatched medium to use. Without an actual physical body to interact with, these tools get harder to use.
2. Active listening, labeling and mirroring. This is most of what you will be doing. People have their own ideas of what the term "systemic racism" even means. Let someone explain their views/understanding. Resist the need to label them ("you are ignorant, racist, etc"). That will derail the entire conversation. The individual can't absorb information while trying to defend him/herself. You need to know what they know. Mirror back what they said, so both parties can confirm that you understood their viewpoint correctly. Once they confirm it, you can actually *start* the conversation.
3. Don't force someone to admit you are right. That's not the point of the interaction and if someone senses this, they will instinctively resist what you say.
4. Rinse and repeat. When you get to the end of step 2, you can start providing information. But even with that, the persuader has to stay even-tempered and non-judgmental. Avoid starting sentences with "Why". Why is accusatory and puts people into defense mode."
I doubt that the political environment will become any less hostile. The election of Donald Trump is the possible end of all relevance of liberalism in America except in a few states and cities. America is about to become a brutal, authoritarian, hierarchical world. Humanistic values have given way to the values of planters and Gilded-Age plutocrats. The worst parts of the American heritage have prevailed, and they will be in power for perhaps far longer than one term of a Presidency.
If America has been divided on the President largely for the melanin content in his skin, then Donald Trump is going to divide us on class and ethnicity as a cultural Apartheid comes into existence. Know well that even if you are white you have only one excuse for appreciating anything outside the moronic swill of country music, tabloid media, reality television, and fundamentalist Christianity. We are in for a very bad time.... think of the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
If you are a visible minority because of religion or ethnicity, then form your own ethnic neighborhoods (ghettos in the Jewish sense) as fortresses to defend yourselves from outsiders and to preserve what you have every right to consider superior about your heritage. If you are white and nominally Christian and you have any eccentricities that cause you to prefer Bach to country music, then use your heritage as an excuse for difference. Put up that German, Italian, Polish, or Finnish (among others) with pride. The Union Jack can do, too: British and American culture are not the same.
Do not be afraid to send your kids abroad for education. Latin-American countries have some excellent colleges and universities, and they are much less expensive than American money-churners. Countries with declining populations might offer attractive schooling. Sure, your kid might become a Finn, but that I can imagine far worse -- like becoming an American dullard or wasting one's potential. Getting away from the glass ceilings in America (which will go lower and be more rigid -- the analogy will be to ceilings so low that one will have to bend one;s knees to negotiate one's way in life.
If you are part of a liberal and humanistic culture then you identity as an American is now shaky. But if you like your culture full of substance, then you have no cause for pride in America. That cause for pride died on November 8, 2016.
Do not try to convince the fanatics on the other side of your rightness. I talked to one Trump supporter and almost came to blows. The fellow said that America needed to vote in accordance with "God's Law", which meant voting against abortion, same-sex marriage, and scientific secularism.
I have my idea of what "God's Laws" are -- the logical dialectic, mathematical rules, and fundamental realities of physics. The basic rules of human decency (which Donald Trump and the fascist wing of American politics make a sick mockery) can be derived, but somehow they are best put into prophecy (do not murder, do not steal, do not perjure yourself, do not make fraudulent oaths, follow parental guidance until such is no longer necessary, have some loyalty to a group, do not endanger marriages) for the instruction of children who are unready to understand why those laws exist.
If you have a religious tradition, then use it to find pretexts for your difference. I consider "Do not exploit others economically" as a worthy corollary of "Thou shalt not steal". Economic exploitation is one of the greatest possible sins, and it will be the cornerstone of the AmeriKKKan economy. (I am tempted to use Black nationalist language of the 1970s... we are all ni**ers now). If you are a Christian of any kind, then know the Sermon on the Mount well, for in it Jesus offers his only economic and political wisdom. He never said, "Sell all your possessions and give them to the rich so that you can follow Me". In Jesus' time the rich were heirs and criminals who had done nothing to earn respect. We may be back there very soon.
Consider starting a small business. Yes it is hard -- but so will be life as a farm or factory laborer, a miner or logger, or domestic servant. Such middle-class jobs as there are will increasingly go to the well-connected who toe the political line beginning with membership in the pro-Trump equivalents of Hitlerjugend, Balilla, or Young Pioneers. The most fanatically devoted will get the chances to attend diploma mills (and American colleges and universities will become those because politics will matter more than creativity and curiosity) where they get to learn to be teachers of the ideological junk or brutal cops. Small businesses demand that the owner and likely his family each work 70 to 80 hours a week -- but so will industrial work. The post-democratic America wil have plenty of work and demand that it be done; it will no longer make pay relate in any way to productivity. Any surplus of productivity will go to the rapacious Master Class devoid of any human decency. 70 to 80 hours a week in a restaurant that your family owns with the privilege of keeping most of the profits within the family is surely better than working 70 to 80 hours for near-starvation pay.
Remember -- it is back to the plantation of the Jim Crow era and the sweatshop of Gilded-Age early capitalism. Count on the Right making America look like a Marxist stereotype of capitalism.
Above all, recognize who your real Savior might be.
KARL MARX
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.