Chuck what you said about people not wanting to admit they are wrong hit home with me. I vow to sit with this idea and think of times I was wrong. Off the top of my head, I was wrong about not wanting to take the pills that were prescribed to me. I've gotten used to taking them now and it's not a burden anymore. I think they are doing me good.
There are certain things that I think of as core values for me and I hope they never change. I think all people deserve respect and to have their basic needs met. I think we are only as good as how we treat those who are poor or suffering. I believe in being kind and giving each person a chance. I believe people have a right to decide what happens to their own body. No one has a right to threaten or force others. That kind of thing. And maybe these people Katherine was talking about have hate as one of their core values. Maybe they experienced childhood trauma that pushed them away from other people.
This may be pollyannish, but possibly the act of admitting you're wrong could be reframed as changing your mind. I do know that people changed their mind about Trump and voted against him in the latest election. Sadly there are those who changed their minds the other way, including some people in our circle, including Brokies! 
No one wants to admit they are wrong, they view it was being weak. So rather than admit an error, they will double down and hold on to their original answers and feelings like a pit bull with a pork chop. Admitting one is wrong or that one doesn't have all the answers is a weakness, but then being viewed as overly smart is also a detriment now.
I can remember when Obama was campaigning, and they were saying he was "elite", as a way to make his intelligence appear negative. I remember thinking: "Why is this a bad thing? I want my president to be smarter than me."
I'm not surprised by this at all. I find myself unsure of how to deal with friends that I have that support Trump. A friend posted this on Facebook, and it nailed exactly how I was feeling, and put much better than how I could say it. It started with a quote from James Baldwin:
"We can disagree and still love each other....unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist."The post, which my friend shared from another FB page, then expanded on this in the original posters' own words:
Maybe I'll put it another way. You know me well enough to know that I believe in civility, decency, coming together, bipartisanship, and making love, not war. But there has to be a baseline of morality, of shared humanity, first. Unless and until that's there, we can go no further. If you do not pass the James Baldwin test of humanity — not just for myself, but for my LGBTQ family, people of color and women, religious minorities, people with disabilities, for EVERYONE — then we cannot yet come together. These are matters upon which I will never, ever "agree to disagree."
You gleefully voted for a sociopath and his party, all of whom pose a direct threat to me and those I love. I’m not going to just pretend that didn’t happen for the sake of your comfort.However, after all that, I keep coming back to the fact that this is the US, and people have the right to vote for who they choose, just as they don't have the right to impose their beliefs on me, I don't have the right to do that to them either.
So how do we move on?
Thank you! At least my paper is doing fairly well, relatively. Nobody's been laid off -- in fact, they're hiring. I heard just yesterday that there are now NO daily papers in North Dakota.
I think their core values are things like "People should have to work to support themselves, not expect support from others who earned what they have." Which is why they don't like universal health care, welfare, immigration, taxes, etc. "People should follow the law, and if they don't they should be punished." Which is why they like harsh crime bills and capital punishment, why they think Trump would have been a good "law and order" president who'd crack down on crime, why they were more alarmed by the unrest following George Floyd's death they were by the death itself. "The police are there to protect us and they have a difficult, dangerous job."
I could go on an on. They think people of color are more likely to be poor because they don't work hard and are disproportionately in prison because they commit more crimes, rather than that they have a harder time getting good jobs and are treated unfairly in the criminal justice system. They think the 1950s were the good old days because everyone lived pretty peacefully and shared similar values. They think society got out of hand in the 1960s and needs to go back to the traditional ways.
Of course, I think all these core beliefs have strong counterarguments. I think they're either wrong or don't see the whole picture. But those are their beliefs and they don't change easily.
Researchers have found that people who identify as Democrats or liberals and people who identify as Republicans or conservatives have very different core values when you take politics out of it. Respect for authority vs. questioning authority. Personal responsibility vs. societal support. Tradition vs. change.
I think something like realizing you were wrong about your pills isn't as hard as some of these other things. And if you strongly believed that Trump is a good, smart, regular guy working on behalf of your best interests, it's hard to acknowledge he's just the opposite and admit you were fooled all along.
But another problem I've seen in politics is that when politicians DO change their minds, realizing some policy they supported had negative consequences, we label it flip-flopping.
Yes, I agree with the flip-flopping/waffling aspect. There is nothing wrong with changing one's mind. Being open-minded is a positive thing. I also agree that Democrats and Republicans have different core values. The thing is, I don't disagree with all of those core values. However, I do disagree with the ones that affect the rights of others (right to marriage, right to choose, equal pay for equal work)
I believe you get your point across--George Floyd's death was a horrible tragedy and a criminal act-- but I also believe that's a bit unfair to people of whatever stripe who were in danger of losing businesses they may have spent many years building, especially in cities that had no connection to Floyd's murder.
Good point. But in Minneapolis, at least, very few of those people were likely right-wing Trump supporters, given the neighborhood (mostly low income and/or lefty), with the possible exception of corporate-owned chain stores.
So yeah, people whose stores were destroyed -- I talked to one guy, the manager of a looted thrift store -- would have good reason to be upset. But most people think that some of the looting and burning was committed by opportunists. For example, they caught six white teenage boys who had driven in from Wisconsin expressly to loot liquor stores.
I would have thought one exception would be the police station that was burned. Protesters would have motive for that (it's the precinct of George Floyd's killers). And I think some have been arrested. But a couple of weeks ago they arrested a guy who shot an AK-47 into the building with people inside and apparently did other arson-y things. That guy identifies with the Boogaloo Boys (per Wikipedia: a loosely organized far-right, anti-government, and extremist political movement in the United States. ... Boogaloo adherents say they are preparing for, or seek to incite, a second American Civil War which they call the boogaloo.)
That said, circumstances may have been entirely different in other cities. In Chicago, for instance, I believe stores were attacked along the swanky Miracle Mile.
Around here we usually distinguish between protesters and people looting/burning, etc. Obviously there's no doubt some overlap, so in general we call it "unrest" to cover both phenomena.
But yeah, in my previous point I meant people alarmed by the rioting -- which, fair enough, is certainly alarming -- but aren't equally alarmed about racist policing. And of course the protesters aren't solely concerned about George Floyd's murder, but also the pattern of similar killings in other cities, or even just Black people being more likely to get pulled over for minor things, etc.
I'm sure that most people would be against the looting and destruction of property, but they need to realize a few things. First is that (as Katy stated) there were counter-protesters who took part to make the original protesters look bad. Another point that I saw made on Facebook was that when things started amping up, people were trying to peacefully protest by taking the knee during the anthem, and they were vilified for that. So when you take peaceful protest away, what does that leave?
Topic: Cellar Scribblings (Read 12940593 times)