Raise questions.

Raise questions.

Sharing our stories is a big step. Next we want to examine them closely, compare them, weave together the parts that fit or run parallel, tease apart the ones that don't, and maybe come up with better versions. We can accept each other’s stories and question them, too.

• Question the sources, look behind the slogans.

# We can ask questions, even in casual encounters. Do a lot of Mexicans work in your industry? Why do you think employers can get away with paying them less? Who hired them? What would you do if you couldn’t find work in your home town?

# We can ask ourselves how we know something, or what we base our assumptions on. How do we know teens will mess up without constant supervision? How do we know Hillary wants to impose socialized medicine? How do we know we have to pass laws to make foreigners learn English? How do we know Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons? How do we know liberals want Osama to conquer the U.S.?

# Lots of times people will have personal stories to back up their opinions. We can challenge the labels and links without disputing the experience. When I asked my GED class to write about why students drop out of school, Colleen said, "they're addicted." I asked her what she meant, and she told me she was suspended several times for smoking cigarettes, and she fell so far behind in her schoolwork she figured she could never catch up. I pointed out that "addiction" didn't really describe what had happened to her.


• Highlight the contradictions, ask for explanations.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"Everyone is just a barrel of contradictions." --D.G. Rosenstein 4-28-07
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Because we’re so good at compartmentalizing our lives, we can hold on to a lot of contradictory beliefs and behaviors. We can lavish vast care and patience on the family addict while demanding prison terms for other drug users. We can refuse to steal from our employers while they are stealing from the public. We can suspect all politicians while adorning the TV with mystical healing crystals. We can be so compassionate that we spend thousands of dollars to cure a sick puppy, and so oblivious that we never consider how many Haitians that same sum could save from starvation. It all depends on the lines we draw around what we’re responsible for, in what area of life.

I mentioned earlier Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance, the powerful stress generated by conflicts between cherished ideas and actual experience. My own experience reflects the research: we are highly motivated to minimize the inconsistencies among our beliefs, and close any gaps between what we expect and what we see in the world. First we generate a million excuses to paper over the contradictions. We can be extremely clever with our justifications; paranoids are merely the most creative. It seems likely that the waxing and waning of political participation over time expresses in part opposite strategies to reconcile or contain contradictions: to remake the political world in our own image, or to wall it off as incorrigibly corrupt.

Sometimes, though, the compartments leak, the excuses fall short, and we have to reconsider our opinions. Such cracks in the wall represent an opening for political learning. For example, Rokeach devised an experiment in which students were asked to rank a set of values, including freedom and equality, then give their opinions about civil rights. The researchers then pointed out to some of the students possible contradictions in their answers, and asked them if they were satisfied. Months later the students were tested again on their attitudes (for instance, by asking for donations to the NAACP). The students who’d been challenged were more likely to change opinions than those who had not (Kasschau 466).

One common site of contradictions is where we’re put in a position of defending policies we don’t actually have any say in, so we’re not just struggling with facts, but with our roles as well. The United Food and Commercial Workers once brought in the state ombudswoman to address the complaints of nursing home staff. But the official couldn’t answer most of the questions, saying instead, over and over, “O, there’s a number you can call to get help for that.” The workers continued to name problem after problem. Finally, the official conceded that, in fact, her office has little power to address the most serious issues. She may never have admitted that before, even to herself. It meant that everyone could shift their attention to devising more far-reaching and productive strategies.

Sometimes we find out that what looks like a contradiction to us doesn’t seem that way to others. For instance, the way Christian women discuss LaHaye’s Left Behind series poses gender roles quite differently than I would have imagined of a frankly patriarchal system (Frykholm 91 ff)-- and perhaps differently than would have been described two generations ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if the waxing and waning of Christian political activism over time did not correlate with strategies to reduce contradictions by a) remaking the world in the image of Iran, and b) turning their backs on the broader community, as too sinful to bear.

Do-gooders, too, have to wrestle with contradictions. Here’s one that pops up now and again: If the world is so full of meanness now, what gives us the idea it could ever be otherwise? I mean, get real! Most political workers probably have an answer that we tucked away years ago. Does it still hold? Addressing puzzles like this can also help us understand why other folks might have a different take.

(We don’t have to take seriously the false contradictions ascribed to us by the servants of Halliburton, such as the facts that lefties drive polluting cars, that we protest rights abuses in Israel more than in Cuba, that we don’t defend U.S. born workers against the immigrant onslaught. The right’s accusations all rest on false premises: that the global environmental crisis is a result of individual consumer choice rather than systems of large-scale destruction; that Israel and Cuba hold the same place in U.S. foreign policy; that immigration is a kind of consumer choice and that the welfare of U.S. workers depends on the impoverishment of workers overseas.)

In extreme cases, as we’ve seen, sometimes the need to reconcile contradictions pushes us to reject the evidence of our own senses, e.g. the argument that climate change is a liberal hoax. That’s much harder to do in a group, when it includes people with different perspectives who nonetheless respect each other. As with the fella in the budget class that I mentioned above, once we feel that others are taking us seriously, even if they don’t see things just the way we do, we too begin to take our stories seriously, and think them through, and take responsibility for them. It’s harder to lie to ourselves and each other.

Here are some common contradictions:
• We have few rights in the workplace so we can’t let unions boss us around.
• We fear terrorist attacks so we attack other peoples at random.
• There’s little safety net for the middle class, so we should get rid of welfare for women in poverty.
• Our kids show us no respect, so we hit them.
• We seek freedom, and spend a year’s income on an SUV.
• We don’t trust our government, and demand that everyone recite the Pledge.

Thomas Frank notes how often our political choices result in the opposite of what we claim to want: “Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. . . . Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat-packing. . . . Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes . . .” (Scialabba).

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