Who are we conversing with?

Clearly not the right people. As half-empty as that sounds, this series of articles has seemed to discover that. Rather than go through the run down of the previous posts, I’m just going to point out the search feature for this sight. So let’s get into it.

At this point, it’s feels right to state that I am in no way, anti-discussion. In order to grow, one needs to leave the comfort zone of one’s friends and talk with people who disagree. That said, any productive conversation requires listening. More so, any productive talks requires people to shed their fears of being wrong or feeling attacked. By opening up to vulnerability, genuine interaction becomes possible.

So who have we been talking with this whole time if not the right people? Tailored content on social networks and specialized news sources have made it possible to only receive information from like-minded people. Once reading an exciting or controversial story, we share it on social media as our next response for our friends to read it too and inform themselves on the issue.

From there, our friends and us go back and forth commenting on the post, pumping each other up, while ignoring the possibility there’s a disagreeing opinion just as valid as ours. The same thing happens away from social media as well.

Instead of sharing an article on social media, we choose our news sources because of where their values stand rather than where they stand on the unbiased truth. The fact of the matter is all news sources will have their specific biases. No matter how much we try to control for bias, it will always creep in. Yet, rather than accept this and work to limit it, we embrace it.

Each of us at one point has complained about a news source “being too right-wing” or “being too liberal” and picked a different one instead. That is a major issue.  A future post will cover this topic.

Back to the issue at hand, it all comes down to empathy. Without any dissenting beliefs present in our lives, it becomes too easy to ignore why people feel oppositely as us. We’ve x’d out the phrase “walk a mile in their shoes” from our vocabulary as our immediate response becomes “they don’t see it my way”.

To take it back to the welcome post to this blog, in which I originally asked these four questions, this seems to be another generational issue we deal with. We can break out of it relatively simply.

By making an effort to talk to people that disagree with us, by listening to them to learn rather than to talk back, by asking them why they feel that way, we can finally have a productive dialogue. Lord knows we deserve one.

Thanks for taking the time to follow this series. Even if you haven’t, you can pretend like you have and think that thank you is for you anyway. More posts will for sure come. That explore culture, music and some of my other interests. As always, feel free to comment or share. Let me know if you agree, disagree, hate my writing, love it, etc. It’s all part of the dialogue.