Progress starts with respect—and a shared acceptance of reality.

Progress starts with respect—and a shared acceptance of reality.

Good afternoon. 

I had to look no further than my inbox today to see that the two different versions of reality on display in the U.S. Capitol yesterday also exist here in Monterey County. From one reader: “Trump is a traitor. That is perfectly clear.” From another: “To the United States citizens that voted in the recent presidential election, and if you condone the massive, verifiable voter fraud, how can you call yourself an American?”

To be clear—the violent storming of the Capitol yesterday, a last-ditch and foolhardy effort to derail a peaceful transition of power, is undoubtedly treasonous, the most anti-American conduct imaginable, a middle finger extended toward the most sacred of American institutions. That President Trump enabled and condoned this is unconscionable. It is, without a doubt, sedition. 

But in this world of alternative facts, the members of the violent mob in Washington are unchastened, as are their allies here at home. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have pledged to represent all Americans, not just those who voted for them. How can they begin to represent people who don’t believe they won the election? How can I, in my own community, begin to talk to people who see a different reality—who believe Covid-19 is a “plandemic” concocted by the government as a tool of oppression, who believe that the election was rigged despite reams of airtight evidence to the contrary, who believe yesterday’s acts of treason were legitimate protest? 

I called Sue Parris, chapter director of the National Coalition Building Institute’s Monterey County chapter, to ask. A big part of the work ahead, she says, is internal. “It’s not just about changing them,” Parris says. “We all have to be part of that change.” As one white person speaking to another white person, she told me: “It’s much easier for us to get really, really mad at the bad white people and not take responsibility.”

I’m game for that part, I say—taking responsibility for the ways the system benefits me, for seeing how a mostly white anti-government crowd got away with a spectacle of violence that would have been incomprehensible if they’d been people of color. But I still want her to give me a roadmap. 

“Conversations that start with, ‘I’m going to teach you something,’ or ‘I’m going to show you why you’re wrong,’ that has never worked,” Parris says. “It’s very hard to have those conversations without establishing a relationship, without coming from some level of respect.” 

Respect traitors? This strikes me as a totally crazy suggestion. I ask Parris if she’s serious, and she is: “Respecting a human being as a human being is a different thing than saying whatever you do is fine. On some level, we have stopped seeing other people as human, starting with Black people. We’re not going to be able to connect unless we see each other as human.” 

I’ll admit, my conversation with Parris left me frustrated, if not surprised that there’s no easy or clear path forward. If we knew how to have productive dialogues with everyone, how to cut through the propaganda to a shared truth, we would not have witnessed yesterday’s violence. We could disagree and we could protest peacefully. 

Parris expects the timeline for progress to be a long one. Indigenous people she works with talk about change over seven generations, members of Building Healthy Communities talk about a 70- or 80-year timeline. 

In the scheme of American history—which not long ago condoned slavery, and allowed only white men to own property or to vote, the list goes on—we’ve made a lot of progress. But yesterday shows me that we have so much further to go.

I’m willing to follow the advice, seek some common ground as human beings if you want to talk and find those places for mutual agreement and respect. But that means no false equivalencies—Black Lives Matter protesters, who are standing up against lifetimes of indignity and violence, are not the same as yesterday’s anti-government action, for example. If you want to talk straight about common ground as human beings, we have to accept we’re in this reality together as a starting point.

-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com