Fel

Lucia started pulling her pillow and blankets down from her bed to the floor, so she could plug the iPad into the wall socket. I said, you don’t need to plug it in, Lu, it has plenty of power. (It was at 87%, more than enough to watch a movie as she falls asleep.)

She insisted that the iPad needed to be charged. “That’s my opinion,” she said, as she plugged in the cord.

“It may be your opinion, Lu, but your opinion is wrong.”

“Well,” she said, snuggling into her makeshift bed on the floor, “it’s my opinion, so it’s right for me.”

And with that simple statement, my 6-year-old granddaughter elucidated all we need to know about the difficulty of trying to convince anybody of anything.

The depth of insight and wisdom in this timely article by Parisa Parsa, Executive Director of Essential Partners (formerly Public Conversations Project), is extraordinary. I love how Parsa, based on this well-known maxim from Elie Wiesel …

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

… eloquently makes the case for a bigger vision of what we typically mean by “taking sides.” Instead of choosing one side over another, she speaks of making  a commitment to “being present with the many perspectives that reside around any issue that matters.”

Further elaborating, Parsa says:

“We don’t take a single side, because true liberation is a choice made from seeing the whole.”

Many more insights in this short, brilliant essay:

Turning To Each Other

I recently came across Theory U and Otto Scharmer, a Senior Lecturer at MIT. From the Theory U website:

“Theory U proposes that the quality of the results that we create in any kind of social system is a function of the quality of awareness, attention, or consciousness that the participants in the system operate from.”

Could not agree more. There are many videos on YouTube on Theory U and Scharmer. This one gives a brief overview of a free course Scharmer offers online, which I have signed up for:

I will report back after taking the course.

After the recent tragic deaths in Baton Rouge, St. Paul and Dallas, I read this tweet from S.I. Rosenbaum that perfectly expresses a position that would seem obvious to any thinking person:

I don’t think it is a particularly political stance to oppose the assassination of police officers AND the extrajudicial killing of citizens.

I’m on the side of everyone who’s against both police brutality & brutality against police. It’s not a complicated position.

And the impromptu coming together of Black Lives Matter protesters and All Lives Matter protesters in the video linked below gives me hope that Rosenbaum’s and Fuselsang’s we’re-all-in-this-together understanding is growing. It’s unlikely this meeting of opposing groups will prove a one-step cure-all, but it is a good start and example to us all.

Take a look at the 80-second video:

Opposing Protesters Meet in Dallas

Yep, this pretty well sums up the problem. We tend to not truly listen to opposing points of view, nor objectively consider dissenting analyses of our own positions and opinions. This is human nature. We all do it reflexively, even though this behavior is demonstrably harmful to everybody involved in most cases.

How do we get beyond this innate tendency to defend our own positions and dismiss opposing views? Well, that’s a big subject, one that I intend to dive into and explore with any and all well-intended parties here at Real Talk Revolution. I invite you to jump in with me.

(Thanks to Tom Toles, one of my favorite political cartoonists.)