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Joseph Tiant's avatar

I'm going to make a similar suggestion to what I made on Twitter... We need to start reaching out to small groups.

Right now, if you try to present a logical argument on the internet, you're shouting at the sky. It's futile. We're not going to change thousands of lives the way we really want to. We will feel good about ourselves for "owning the libs," though.

I'm reminded of the story of a white supremacists son who went off to college. He was insistent that Jews were evil. Someone decided to show him compassion and invited him over for dinner. Over the course of months, feeding him and letting him get to know the Jewish man who was being kind, he began to see that he was wrong. Not because someone presented a logical argument or because they shouted him down or cancelled him, but because they were kind and they ate with him.

This is the same strategy that Christ used in His time. He would invite the sinners to dine with Him, and then they would turn from their sinful ways.

Our ability to reach out to the world has destroyed our ability to affect change locally. It's all too small. We don't help the poor man on the corner; we give money to the national campaign against homelessness (or whatever). We don't talk to mothers in crisis; we post about Supreme Court justices.

We're all debating everything on a national level or on a worldwide level.

COVID has made this whole thing worse. For nearly a year, for hundreds of millions of people around the world, their association with their fellow man has been limited to what they posted on Facebook or Twitter or (Social Media Platform X). We've dehumanized EVERYONE we meet and put them in categories of either "with us" or "against us."

We need to get off the internet, sit down, and just enjoy some time with other humans without thinking about whether they agree or disagree.

If you can't meet with them face to face, take the discussion away from the public sphere and send messages back and forth. Create a dialog that's more than what you can type in 240 characters.

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Michelle's avatar

I cannot help but think this is related to the diminishment of the family.

I grew up with 10 sets of aunts and uncles, dozens of cousins, and an even larger number of great-aunts and uncles, second cousins, third cousins, etc. Just about every philosophy under the sun was represented by people who greeted me with a smile, hug, and kiss each time I saw them. No matter what they sat around the tables and argued over, they all showed up every time to eat and drink and mostly ignore the children running through their midst.

We don't really have to much of that now. My husband and I made a concerted effort to mimic this for our kids since we live away from family, but the best we could do was host regular gatherings for friends. But we choose our friends. Our friends mostly have the same views as us.

Maybe if we had bigger blood tribes we wouldn't seek out ideological ones.

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