Maybe I am very naïve, but I have hope for humanity. But every so often that hope is burned to the ground. Case in point, this weekend I was hanging out with friends that I have known for over 20 years; doing what many of us were doing…drafting out fantasy football team. Now my friends are a perfect sample of America with some being diehard liberals or conservatives, blue collar/white collar jobs, and varying levels of education.
Of course midway through the draft I decided to divert from the normal ball busting trash talk and had to bring up politics. So I decided to do an experiment and ask my friend, who is a huge Trump supporter, what he really thinks of the Russia collusion case. I purposely left my opinion out of it and was purely curious to see what his thoughts were about it.
Before I could even get my question fully out, my friend interrupted me and said what evidence…what facts? Where did you get your information from…CNN or MSNBC? When I tried to redirect and say that I am not saying I believe or not believe there was collusion I was just curious what you think. He immediately brought up that there is no evidence. I retorted back that there is no evidence yet and anyone who say that they have or don’t have evidence is lying because the investigation isn’t completed yet.
He then went on a 10 minute diatribe about how that is illegal and wasn’t right and evidence that they don’t have anything. When I asked what he knows about federal prosecution and how prosecutors form a case he said that he didn’t know anything but it didn’t matter because they didn’t have any evidence anyways. When I went on to agree with him that nobody knows but what I think people are going off of is the people around him being tried and convicted for these things. I used the analogy that if every one of your child’s friends were busted for drugs but you had no evidence would you think they might be guilty? Which immediately provoked another barrage of insults and accusations that I thought Trump was guilty.
At that point I simply just made fun of him like a good friend and told him to make his next fucking pick. What was most telling about this exchange is that people are each side of the spectrum are so primed for a fight, that even when you agree with someone or are asking their honest opinion they get defensive and go into attack mode. Think about that…here I am a friend of 20 years, using totally neutral language, and a trained counselor who knows how to de-escalate situations, and I couldn’t get us to have a civil conversation. I don’t blame him…I simply blame the politicians and media personalities for getting people so amped up and defensive just to get a vote or to gain viewers. I don’t even know if they understand how badly this is affecting Americans or whether they know and just don’t care.
But the sad truth is that if I couldn’t have this conversation with him, do people who truly reside on opposite ends of the spectrum stand any chance of finding a common ground?
