I have tried talking with mine. Unfortunately, they are a bunch of MAGA troglodytes who blindly support this country and its current administration
I did have a lot more success with mine. They were also largely right-wing middle-class zombies stuck on fox news, but with the power of yard sales and asking a lot of questions, I found connection with a few of them.
The idea is, we’re not trying to change the world. We’re just trying to be that “one good one” to at least one conservative/liberal who thinks in stereotypes and cartoon pictures of the world. When I say “I found connection” I also don’t mean I made great friends, but rather I met people and were invited into their lives and had new perspectives of why they were stuck and how to empathize with their ignorance and stilted desires for a better world, and I used my human ability to think and reason to find ways to care about them as humans without immediately just trying to change them, which drives people away. We as a species can remove a spider from our home safely, we can preserve wetlands with crocodiles, we can certainly find compassion for local dumbasses who just never had curiosity sparked in them, if nothing else so they know your name, so they know you’re a person deserving of life, not a 2-dimensional cut-out of some enemy idea. So when the squads start driving up and down our streets people work harder to take care of each other.
I wouldn’t tell people to go befriend someone who hates them for their skin color or accent (although some people are exceptional even at that) but I think if we humanized ourselves more to the people we would rather avoid, it is breaching a gap that’s growing wider and more dangerous by the day.
I did have a lot more success with mine. They were also largely right-wing middle-class zombies stuck on fox news, but with the power of yard sales and asking a lot of questions, I found connection with a few of them.
The idea is, we’re not trying to change the world. We’re just trying to be that “one good one” to at least one conservative/liberal who thinks in stereotypes and cartoon pictures of the world. When I say “I found connection” I also don’t mean I made great friends, but rather I met people and were invited into their lives and had new perspectives of why they were stuck and how to empathize with their ignorance and stilted desires for a better world, and I used my human ability to think and reason to find ways to care about them as humans without immediately just trying to change them, which drives people away. We as a species can remove a spider from our home safely, we can preserve wetlands with crocodiles, we can certainly find compassion for local dumbasses who just never had curiosity sparked in them, if nothing else so they know your name, so they know you’re a person deserving of life, not a 2-dimensional cut-out of some enemy idea. So when the squads start driving up and down our streets people work harder to take care of each other.
I wouldn’t tell people to go befriend someone who hates them for their skin color or accent (although some people are exceptional even at that) but I think if we humanized ourselves more to the people we would rather avoid, it is breaching a gap that’s growing wider and more dangerous by the day.