#again op i'm sorry for putting this goddamn novel on your post hghdfg

[churchyardgrim]

this got way, way longer than i meant it to lmao so it's going behind a readmore, but the gist is: op you're absolutely correct on every front here

i work with a bitter, misanthropic guy in his 50s who's had to restart his life three times bc of poverty and addiction and abandonment, and who swears up and down that you can't trust people, that nobody cares about each other, that there's no one around worth leaning on, and by all accounts this trump-voter should loathe me

the guy declared me one of his best friends within a month of meeting me

because i listened when he talked about his life, and made sympathetic faces, and said "i'm sorry man, that's fucked up and it shouldn't have happened to you", and apparently that's the most kindness he's been shown in years.

also somehow queer rights is like. the only thing he's remotely progressive on? he might've offered to do physical harm to anyone that gives me shit for my gender, in that career criminal "i know a guy" way?? still not sure how to feel about that one

but the point is, i was gentle and nonconfrontational with him. i let him rant for an hour or two a week about this and that and his life and such, and it's been... educational, i think. this is a guy who bought into The American Dream hook line and sinker. he believes wholeheartedly that Hard Work Earns You Your Life. that nothing is free (except america), that if you work hard every day, eventually you'll be rewarded. that suffering for your work is a virtue, that "lazy people" shouldn't be enabled, that the world is full of fakers and liars and scammers and it's only honest people that feed themselves into the capitalist machine that deserve anything good in life.

he's 20 years younger than my dad and he can barely walk. he's worked himself into a disabled state, and refuses to see it as disability. because he's too proud, he says. because he doesn't want to be like those other people on disability.

he was out of work for three weeks with pneumonia, and now he's trying to make up the lost time by pulling 12 hour days in a fabrication shop. and i see how much he hates himself for not succeeding at that even once since he got back. despite still recovering from a three week illness! he thinks he should just bounce back good as new, and that his inability to do so is a personal failing!

and he talks a lot about money, he's very financially insecure. he's been working this hard all his life, working towards the promise of something he's now starting to realize is just as far out of his reach as it ever was, despite everything. he's likely never going to own a home like he wants to. he's likely never going to have a comfortable, modest retirement. he'll be lucky if he can keep working for the next three years.

and he blames all the wrong people for this, everyone who's in the same crab bucket as him, and i really don't think i have much of a shot at changing 50 years of ingrown, festering resentment and anger, but,

i can see where the crowbar would fit. i can see the leverage.

if i wanted to, if i was willing to put my back into involving myself in this guy's life and his health, i could turn that despair around to point at the people actually responsible for it. i could show him how everyone he despises for being "lazy" is just doing their best same as him, and maybe i could show him that the inability to work isn't the sin he thinks it is.

already i've got him thinking about some things! he was going on and on about how trump did the country a million favors, and i was all quiet and listening and then i pointed out that trump actually made a lot of places actively unsafe for me, a visibly queer person, to exist in. and he actually stopped and thought about that. he said he hadn't considered it that way before, that was a new perspective for him.

i don't know how much effect that'll have. i don't know how realistic it is to try to change the mind of a guy like that through a few conversations a week where it's mostly just him traumadumping on the first friendly ear he's had. but at the very least it's a good opportunity to see how the mind of someone like that works, and it's good practice for me in listening and nodding and then saying something that they'll actually listen to in a constructive way.

look. rhetoric that works leverages itself off beliefs that the LISTENER holds, not yours. like how americans believe that they’re in a democracy and they believe they believe in freedom. they believe that their country stands for democracy. you can use their beliefs in your argument even if you don’t share them.

you are operating within the bounds of their ignorance and building a bridge outward. you cannot unpack every single myth about the US and its geopolitical crimes in a conversation. what you can do is persuade someone that they’re looking at a civil rights issue by leveraging their existing understanding of civil rights issues.

unpacking all the bullshit they believe about civil rights movements is also a different and much longer project. you can’t tackle everything at once and the way that WE (online leftists) talk about issues relies on these understandings. just like. try for a second to remember what it was like before you knew a single goddamn thing about anything and you were 100% operating on the unthinking assumption that america flag equals freedom.

if they get far enough that they look at this rhetoric and think “SO MANY INACCURACIES!” GOOD! GOOD! that means they took more steps beyond the first, beyond the simplified rhetorical arguments that made them LOOK in the first place.