Are we ready?

The short answer is: maybe? In the welcoming post to this blog, I questioned how helpful a dialogue really is when discussing controversial issues. Near the end, I brought up four questions I’d like to talk more about about when it comes to “starting a dialogue”. This post, predictably will cover the first of those questions.

Before going forward, I want to recognize the possible hypocrisy of using a blog to question the importance of a dialogue. That said, I don’t consider myself as the end-all-be-all source of knowledge on this topic and would love your comments and disagreements with what I say. Now that we’ve fully gotten the fact that this effectively exists as a dialogue about dialogues out the way, we can move forward.

Back to answering the question, the response depends on how much faith you have in humanity. The answer, more specifically, lies with whether or not you feel like we’re capable of calmly talking with people we disagree with. Normally, after a discussion-provoking event, we see one side of the event angry among themselves, re-assuring each other of the opinions they had before the event took place. The opposing thought pool likely does the same thing.

Instead of a productive conversation about a contentious issue, we end up with two amped up sides yelling at a glass sound-proof wall. Each side is aware of the other sides presence. They can see the other is clearly angry and opposed to them. Yet, neither side hears why the other side is angry. To depict this, I point to Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest.

Earlier this year before joining free agency after a lackluster season on a bad team, Kaepernick announced the official end of his protest.

“He believes the protest did its job by sparking a national discussion about social inequality,” Rolling Stone writer Scott Rafferty wrote on the matter.

In this case, the presence of a national discussion more undeniable. In a time when NFL ratings struggled during the first chunk of the season, Kaepernick’s silent protest worked itself in perfectly as a backdrop to the 2016 Presidential Election. The existence of a discussion, though, is just half of the way to progress. The other half requires productivity.

At a time when the United States’ election pressed people towards the furthest ends of the political spectrum, the debate over Kaepernick’s kneel was destined to polarize from the start. By the time the months-long story blew over, not many opinions had shifted. Not many people had actually given deep thought to their own opinions. Though the occasional interaction with someone who disagreed might have seemed frustrating, the bigger picture missed self-reflection, challenge and empathy.

Without these last three elements–self-reflection, challenge and empathy–a productive-dialogue more-than likely won’t happen. If we follow humanity’s recent hot-tempered cues, we might not quite be mature enough at the moment to handle such a talk productively.