J--What is your group meeting about?
G--A stunning thing about how people decide who they will vote for is that a tiny handful of ideas, usually less than a half dozen, will make the difference for them. That tells you that if you can explain just a couple dozen critical points, you're good to go, You can answer nearly any question they ask, and when they are ready to listen to you, you can present a compelling overview of the issues. To develop even that minimal competence, you need an arena where you can practice, which is the group meeting.
J--"Reaching out" to Republicans is a fraught issue for so many. People's lives have been damaged with impunity by policies that rank and file Republicans have supported. With the anger many feel, they find it categorically wrong to "reach out" as though everything is okay, with no accounting and no responsibility for the damage they have endured.
G--You need to affect Republicans so they don't damage you, and you need to be effective at it. A constant concern is that many things we try to do with heated emotions actually make matters worse. Don't do that. A basic point people don't get that should guide po/litical activity is that an idea becomes real based on a person's internal activity of acceptance that almost always rides on a good feeling. If you sense that an idea will be upsetting or painful to you, you instinctively block it out, you refuse even to make it real in your mind. The word "realize" offers a clue. Remember that inner sensation of "realizing" something you didn't know before. You "took in" an idea with an inward action of assimilating, of allowing a fact or experience to strike you, so that your mind acknowledged its reality. You want the person you talk with to have that internal "realizing" event, but their emotions are often arranged precisely to prevent that from happening. Their strong feelings will sort the incoming for what supports or matches the feeling. That's why people resist even grasping the reality of information that could disprove something they believe. About what others see as very bad, their own feeling converts it to good or may shrink it to a zero. In their view, "That and that and that just don't matter." To change people, you have to accept how their emotional filter works, and then find the doorway through it by means of face-to-face harmony, communication, and common values.
J--One level of the argument is about our willingness to put ourselves out at all to help others we see as enemies. What standard could help with that?
G--You absolutely need to understand that what you do to them will help or hurt yourself. If your values are too vague to help you, go back to sheer self-interest. For instance, with all their negative policies, could anything others in your country have done to you hurt you worse than what Germany and Japan did to the U.S. in World War II? The damage was not just from rights violated nor unfairness here and there, but was death. They killed your people, killed them. So what did your country do? It indeed made enemy leaders accountable for war crimes, but for the rank and file citizens, it rebuilt their economies destroyed by the war. For all those Germans who cooperated with the Nazi agenda, they just enabled those folks to return to productive work, which had extremely important outcomes: Germany and Japan have been our most reliable allies ever since. Maybe the rebuilding work was done by people other than those who were shot at, but the point is that you want to turn your opponent into an ally as quickly as you can no matter how badly he hurt you. If you continue to hate, punish, and reject him, do you think that corrects him or makes you safer? Of course not. You literally cause more of exactly what you object to. So target your retribution carefully at those responsible for the damage, and do not prolong your own distress. Aim just to turn around the unwary followers who got caught up by manipulative leaders and help them meet their needs in productive ways..
J--Such an effort asks a lot of people to change their ways. How could that work?
G--Don't make it more complicated than it is. You've already laid out how changes in communications and conversation can make a huge difference (cf. "The Next Hill," in OpEdNews) and have provided more details in your books. Anyone who has gathered a group can decide to start. They need only two things--worthy ideas and vocal cords. Use both in your own corner of society, and it is just a matter of time to obtain big changes. More people need to understand the effort that makes a difference and begin it.
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