EMOTIONS
As I get older I am more and more aware that I am impelled through life by emotions, by what makes me feel more alive and what seems to immobilize or suffocate me. Like all animals I have my driving forces built into me. No other animal consciously makes decisions, at least in the human way. Our visceral drives were built into our DNA long before we were human and these ancient drives still impel us along. So most of my rational decisions are rationalization, affirming choices that are already built into me.
All of these generalizations can be argued with, but they are what I have decided on and how I am making my way along. They come from my reading and experience. But my assumption that humans are driven by unconscious emotional drives leads me to feel that the way to deal with MAGA/Liberal polarization is through first being aware of the strong emotions that are driving both sides. The most important thing for me is empathy, to feel as fully as I can what drives other people along with my assumption that the people on both sides have their identity and values largely determined for them.
If MAGA values or my values were determined for us then we can hardly be blamed for having these values. And if our internal drives are largely emotional rather than rational then the only way to reduce tensions is to have full empathy for others. In addition, love your neighbor as yourself, was basic to what I learned from my missionary parents and the missionary Christian school I attended in India as well as being central, I assume, for evengelical Christians who base their lives on the Bible. So we should have common ground.
So the only way in my mind to reduce tension is to first listen to each other, then to see if there is some way we can reduce tension by compromise.
The experience that has led me to this is to realize that when I was a boy a large number of white Americans learned at home and were taught in school a history of the United States that was unthinkingly white supremacist, male dominated, racially discriminating, religiously Christian fundamentalist, patriotically exceptional, without gender alternatives. These were not taught specifically, they were just unspoken but strongly felt assumptions. When I was a boy these traditional American values were being challenged mildly by liberal values but we still sang “catch a nigger by his toes”, played cowboys and Indians while mocking indigenous people, still called people whom we rarely met, “fags”, mocked people for their disabilities, assumed everyone went to church on Sundays, and felt that America was number one and Americans were exceptional.
Slowly, if our parents were liberal, we learned that all these attitudes that hurt and mocked other people were not politically correct and stopped saying them, but without being able to erase them from our consciousness. And very slowly and often painfully this led to women being given more rights, Black people demanding their civil rights, gay people coming out and asserting themselves as we came to accept that inigenous Americans had been lied to and badly treated, that slavery was a terrible wrong, that women should have rights including control over their own bodies, that immigrants were fellow human beings who had rights, that we lived in a multicultural world. Traditional American values were threatened.
To me these slow shifts in accepting people who were different from white, male, evangelical, straight heterosexual people is the basic cause of the polarization over social issues we have today.
But for the people who felt in their bones that the traditional American values were central to their identity and that all authentic Americans believed as they did, this gradual change was a threat to their American identity. How they grew up was determined by values they felt made America great and intuitively they felt that this political correctness was anti intuitive and wrong. Intuitively they felt that whites had populated and developed North AMerica, intuitively they felt that they were doing God’s will in the new promised land, intuitively gender differences felt nasty and wrong, intuitively they felt that the United States was the strongest and best country on earth. And their politicians affirmed their values.
So if I am going to feel empathy for MAGA people I have to accept that they feel threatened when their values are being undermined by Liberals. And the threat is especially great as the coalition of non white Americans, non church going Americans, non straight Americans, all marginalized Americans are beginning to outnumber the old traditional male,white, evangelical, straight Americans. All of a sudden the ballot box is a threat and has to be controlled.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 