Every endeavor starts with a purpose. My purpose is to do my part to bring civility back to our national discourse. All we seem to do these days is disagree and yell at each other. We have stopped listening to one another and stopped thinking, truly thinking, about what we are doing.
I make this attempt not for me, but for my two daughters. To them I apologize and say I pray you and your generation do better. You have the power and the ability, all you need is the will. There are no road maps, but I do have a few thoughts that might help.
The first thing you need to do is turn off all the political entertainment networks (PENS) such as CNN, Fox and MSNBC. They are not news. Media people breathlessly saying “This Just In”, “Breaking Now” or “Breaking News” who then either tell you the same thing they told you last hour or worse, don’t inform, educate or enlighten you are not purveyors of true news.
The second thing you need to do is learn how to think critically. I got a great piece of advice from Dr. Robert G. Hugman when I was dating his daughter in high school. He told me, and this was the most educated person I had known up to this time, that the most important class he ever had was his logic class as an undergraduate. Learning how to think is more important than learning what to think. PENS have a narrative and they will slice and dice information in any way they can to promote their narrative.
The next thing you need to do is to think about what is truly important. What is truly important to me is leaving this world in better condition than I found it; trying to ensure that my children have a better life and more opportunities than I had; finding the true purpose that God placed me on this earth for; and trying to use the gifts God gave me to achieve the previous three goals. This blog is about achieving those goals.
How does one go about achieving these goals you may wonder. First, you must never stop learning. Challenge yourself mentally every day you are alive. If you think you know the answer, you don’t. I don’t know the answer to our most vexing issues despite being here twice as long as you. Other people, even people you vehemently disagree with, have some of the answers and are part of the overall solution. How do you elicit those ideas and pieces of the total solution? You must learn to listen. Everyone you meet is special and unique and they all have some special gift from which you can learn. You can’t learn if you are trying to talk over them or through them. Listen and learn.
The second thing you should do is be a skeptic. Don’t be a critic or a cynic, but doubt everything everyone tells you until you verify it through some independent means. Too often we believe our politicians, our media or our neighbors only to find out that what they are telling us is the incomplete story. They only tell the parts that promote the narrative that they want to be accepted. Seek the truth through what used to be known as primary sources. I recently started listening to NPR again and watching C-Span because there I can listen for myself to the unedited, complete presentation. What I have found is that while I may not agree with every speaker, they all possess a logic and framework or perspective from which they are operating.
The final thing is to remember that everything is personal. Always try and develop a connection with the person that you are talking with. Do not try and convince them that they are wrong and you, or your position, is right. Focus on identifying where you can make progress on the issue. Too often we fail to make even minimal progress on issues because neither side wants to “lose” which causes us all to lose. A good method to connect is to share a meal with the other person and to learn about them and their likes and dislikes as a person. If you go in thinking they are the enemy then someone must win and someone must lose. But, if you go in thinking here is another person and how can I leverage their ideas to make my ideas better, then you have a chance to achieve your true goals.
A couple of examples on this last point. When email first became the primary means of business communication and people didn’t have to actually talk with each other a phenomenon took root. It became too easy to be snarky and dismissive when you didn’t actually have to face the person you were communicating with. Fast forward almost 30 years it has only gotten worse. When Congress decided to become “family friendly” and only work three or four days a week, they lost connectivity with each other. People that used to see each other in church or at their children’s activities now see each other through an electronic box that encourages conflict and dehumanization.
I want to thank Jennifer Ann Bagby for providing this forum. I don’t know that it will do anything great but if it turns down the temperature even one tenth of a degree it will be worth it.
Jim Bagby 