memes

I agree with and appreciate your honest, realistic perspective.

And I maintain that we can break through the challenges of fear and propaganda designed to push people indoors and to stop organizing, to stop creating communities. It's artificial. It goes against millions of years of evolution. People want to be connected and part of a community, but the manufactured fear is stronger right now.

In fact, this is how I've turned my share of conservatives towards better ways of "thinking" which is understanding that even the person who hates you and everything you stand for, on some level, really, really wants your acceptance. It doesn't sound like it makes sense, but that's just it... our species is loaded with contradictions, it's why we have a reality-TV president and why we have so many people spinning out about wildly unrealistic issues or false-flag stories stoking people's fear and anger. Because we're not rational.

I often tell the story about how at my first job I volunteered to start taking the difficult clients' calls for my boss, they were so happy to hand that task over they didn't care if some monkey from the warehouse like myself was handling it.

What I did was listen to the angry client's calls, I listened to their stories and their feelings and their frustrations, and didn't try to fix it all, just listened and said I understand. Then they would call back and ask for me. Still angry, but now seeking the only person who will let them have emotions about it, then over time they did business only with me, and apologized for their temper earlier.

We can all do this. It's not a jedi trick, but it does take a level of emotional intelligence we're not developing inside on Lemmy and Reddit and Discord. We have to get out more, we have to be the bigger people we think we are. We have to get over our own hangups and fears and insecurities and lead by example. I strongly feel any of us are capable of doing this, even if it's just once, if we all did it we would change our country.