San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A LESSON FROM HARVEY MILK
To heal this divided country, start with your own family
I would never suggest this in a million years, but 2020 feels like 2 million years, so here goes: This is the time to talk with your family about politics. I’m saying that partly because of President Trump, but mostly because of Harvey Milk.
Aided by the coronavirus and technology, politics is ripping us apart. But here’s a holiday twist: The virus and technology also make this the best year in centuries to have that soul to soul talk.
( Pour yourself an eggnog and I’ll explain. Given how convoluted my explanations are, spiking it can only enhance the experience.)
The country is more divided than I’ve ever seen, and I’m 64. If Trump said the sky is mauve, 50 million people would believe him — even if they didn’t know what “mauve” meant. At least 30 million would say he was lying, without ever looking through a dictionary or a window.
A Pew Research study a month before the election found that nearly 90% of registered voters on both sides “worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘ lasting harm’ to the United States.”
Our country is like the Montagues and the Capulets. With Twitter.
“The competition becomes cutthroat and politics begins to feel zerosum, where one side’s gain is inherently the other’s loss,” the Pew report said. “Finding common cause — even to fight a common enemy in the public health and economic threat posed by the coronavirus — has eluded us.”
Because of the virus, you might celebrate the holidays on Zoom. That’s awful for your humanity, but a huge advantage for the political conversation.
As a guest ( or host), it can feel rude to bring up something delicate. You don’t want to be the one who ruins the family dinner, the one who makes us spend the next several nights under a dysfunctional roof. But on Zoom, no one has homecourt advantage.
You also don’t need to force everything into The Big Conversation. Maybe take a cue from Hanukkah or Kwanzaa and talk more gently over several nights.
You might find that you don’t disagree much at all. You might be dealing with, as Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway once put it, “alternative facts.”
That’s where Milk comes in.
A 1978 ballot initiative, Proposition 6, would have banned gays and lesbians from working in California’s public schools. To defeat it, the San Francisco supervisor and other gay leaders focused on people’s hearts.
They encouraged those in the closet to come out, to make sure straight people understood that gays and lesbians were their friends and neighbors, their merchants and colleagues, their sons and daughters. They weren’t some faceless evil.
Prop. 6, which had been winning in early polls, lost in a landslide. More than 58% of voters rejected it.
Look at this year the same way. If you open people’s eyes, maybe their hearts will follow. Here are some suggestions:
Check your sources. Google “the most trusted man in America.” You’ll find it’s someone who has been dead for 11 years: Walter Cronkite. Now take this from a New York Times story three weeks after the election: “Of the 20 most engaged Facebook posts over the last week containing the word ‘ election,’ all were from Mr. Trump, according to Crowd tangle, a Facebook owned analytics tool. All of those claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact checkers.” When Cronkite was a “CBS Evening News” anchor in the 1960s and ’ 70s, there were few TV channels and no internet, so maybe you watched a news show and read a local newspaper or two. Toss in some conversations with friends, family and colleagues and that’s pretty much how you saw the world.
Now people get information from dozens of sources, including social media. But when anyone can post anything and 24hour news channels are often two hours of news and 22 hours of opinion, it’s easy for the truth to get lost.
“Young people are internet locals,” College Reaction founder Cyrus Beschloss told Axios after his firm surveyed 868 students this summer. “Because they swim through so much content, they’re wildly savvy at spotting bogus content.”
But older people struggle. Those in red states might be cynical about newspapers from blue states, and they may not be familiar with names like Vox and Breitbart and BuzzFeed News and Newsmax and Salon and Politico and 538. Who do you trust?
The journal Science Advances found that people 65 and older were far more likely than younger people to share disinformation on social media during the 2016 presidential campaign. Vox reported that many Asian Americans, particularly firstgeneration immigrants, are being targeted now with propaganda in their native languages.
Trusting friends might not be the smartest strategy, either. A 2017 study from the Media Insight Project found that if people trust the person who shares a news item on social media, that matters more than who produced the article. So one gullible person can cause a misinformation outbreak.
Here’s the good news: Maybe you can supplant that misinformed friend. But to do that, you actually have to be a friend — the kind who listens, not the kind who manipulates.
Start slowly. Maybe say something like, “There’s a lot of bad information in the media right now about COVID and the election and god knows what else. Does it feel like you’re drowning in B. S. sometimes?”
If they bring up something, ask questions rather than argue. You want to start a conversation, not dominate it. But try to get them beyond the generalities like “fake news” and into something specific.
Make a mental note of any “alternative facts” they bring up. Find something online, preferably that day, and pass it along if it might enlighten them. If it’s longwinded, maybe mention the high point in your note: “Hey, this Chronicle story quotes some scientists as saying the sky is really blue, not mauve. See what you think.”
Make sure sources pass the credibility test, too. And don’t share 15 words of facts wrapped in 2,000 words of opinion.
On the other hand, if they don’t want to discuss politics, just say something like, “I’m on the internet with work all the time. So if you ever see something that seems to be B. S., let me know and I’ll try to check it out, OK?”
You’re opening a door. Maybe there will be a brick wall on the other side, but it’s a start.
Choose your battles. If someone’s beliefs are based on emotion ( and lots of ours are), you’re usually wasting your time trying to change them. If having a handgun in their home makes someone feel safer, for example, quoting statistics about suicides and accidents won’t do any good.
If you come across bigotry, think about Milk. He couldn’t conquer true bigotry, of course. Nobody can. But he knew that a lot of it came from ignorance, and he could conquer. You live in one of the most diverse places on the planet. If you share how your experiences and relationships have helped you grow as a person, maybe it will sink in.
Vox reported in January about a similar approach called “deep canvassing” that has been successful for some activists. They listen to a person’s beliefs and concerns without arguing, then describe their own experiences.
Don’t try to bypass that whole “listening” thing, though. Empathy works both ways.
You might be disappointed — certainly some gays and lesbians were in 1978 — but maybe your relatives will learn something. Maybe you will, too.
Be specific. Trump capitalizes on people’s short attention spans with concise, straightforward statements. You might hate the sentiment behind “Build a wall,” but it’s clear what he wants. So is “Medicare for all.”
“Defund the police” isn’t. Does it mean abolish the police? Disarm the police? Retrain the police? Cut funding in half? If you want someone on your side, make it clear what your side is — in as few words as possible.
Look for agreements. Extremists get lots of followers on social media. Those with more nuanced positions get lots of quibblers. Twitter in particular seems to specialize in quibbles. If you’re in a subtly different gray area from someone else, no disagreement goes untweeted.
With your relatives, resist the urge to play Twitter’s 50 shades of gray. If you’re close, consider it a victory. In 2020, we need all the victories we can get.