Unsettling Dialogues

One must prepare for disconcerting discussions, when you can have a discussion, with people who have been seeing the world through Faux-colored glasses.  I’m sure you have examples.  Perhaps it would be instructive to share good or bad dialogues to help others think about ploys for constructive engagement….or combating an uninformed/informed debater.

I wish I had been better prepared, but sometimes my composure can just get knocked off my tricycle.   An example, with my good wife--an intelligent woman, daughter of a lawyer--who likes conspiracy theories and tabloid news bits from Faux.

April 6:  I asked if she had seen coverage of the April 5th protests.  She was dismissive, had not paid attention—what were they protesting?  I said that people were protesting a range of Trumps cuts to all sorts of federal programs…He was firing people from various agencies, including Social Security, CDC, Fraud detection, the National Parks Service….. 

She responded: You know, when Biden axed the Keystone Pipeline, 60,000 people lost their jobs in one day. 

I was derailed.  (The pipeline is not something that has been in the news for quite some time.  We had never talked about it.  That 60,000 was too specific and my first impulse was to ask for a fact check.  This information had to be a plant.)  I responded something about how there was no reason to fire National Parks people that maintained trails, etc.  That there was a difference between who Trump was firing and those pipeline workers.  But she was unmoved, having scored points, in her mind. 

On the one hand, debate over the scale/need/benefit/cost of the administration’s cuts could be a worthwhile exercise.  On the other hand, we are not having the debate, we are moving along the road riding two separate trains.

​ ... A friend complained that my FB political posts were divisive.  As if I were trying to divide that which was not already split.  I may not represent his actual meaning, but I think there is a problem here.  He did not want to hear my perspective.  There are those who can not be budged, there are those who have tuned out of the discussion because they see no point in it—nothing will change, and there are those who might be open, but were brought up in a house on the right and have not heard a message from the left that means something to them.

How to get the people in the other train to see our reality.  And also to see the red flag of attempts of the administration (this administration more than most) to control the information.
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We need to give them something better to fix on.  Some commentators are addressing that.  I touch on some ideas in another post.