Chatterboxing

After the past few days of seeing posts in social media and elsewhere that open with: "I can't understand why so many people...," or "I don't know what all of these people...," or "I doesn't make sense to me that this many people...," I really just want to ask: "Have you tried talking to one of them?"

And I get that this takes all of the fun out of it, which is why there are a chorus of reasons why simple conversation is completely out of the question, but when understanding people is the actual task at hand, it does the job quite nicely.

But it means letting go of something that's near and dear to a lot of people, in my experience; the sense that their values and ideals aren't choices, but self-evidently correct obligations. That what are, when it comes down it it, aesthetic judgments about life actually reflect objective reality and that, therefore, anyone of sufficient intelligence and sensitivity should share them, and that the reasons they don't are argued entirely in bad faith. But dropping that, can lead to really useful conversations with people. I still think back with a conversation I had with a White Supremacist in Seattle, likely nearly 20 years ago now. It's not a conversation that I would have signed up for before that point, but I'm really glad that I had it. Mainly because they guy, while being pretty openly a racist, didn't see any need to be a jerk. And so we could talk, and I could really try to understand just where he was coming from.

Of course, random conversations aren't going to solve everything. It's entirely possible that they don't solve anything, really. But a little insight isn't going to kill us. And being trusted by other people enough that they'll actually listen? Well, that might actually get us somewhere.