Stop Assuming Understand Other Views Avoid Toxic Polarizatio

I really do. I do want to understand other people's frame of reference. I'll give you a couple of examples. I got this great friend of mine. He was telling me he used to, there was this gal that he, somehow they worked together and, and they just had different views and they did a very adult thing. They said, Hey, let's meet for coffee and talk about this thing. And they did. And I think they're talking about socialized healthcare. I think that was the thing. And my buddy says, I don't need the government to take care of me. You know, I started working a job when I was 17. I joined the military. I went to OCS. I got done with that. I run a business, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she goes, okay. And then this lady is her turn to talk. And she says, well, when I was three years old, my father left us and we didn't have anything. We didn't, my mother couldn't work enough. And she was estranged from her family. And if it wasn't, you know, for, for, social welfare programs, we wouldn't have made it. And I know there's other people out there like that. They come and immediately he starts going into song and dance about, you know, people see things differently because they've had different experiences. I'll give something that's even probably a little bit closer to home. I've seen this happen numerous, numerous times, like firsthand. There are folks, you could see them driving down the street and they'd see a Black Lives Matter sticker on a car. And the next thing you know, they're practically in, you know, in a rage over the person, you know, they didn't signal. Oh yeah. Next, you know, here comes the plethora of insults and, and, you know, call on the person, a Marxist and racist and everything else. When you don't know that person in that car, they might have a biracial marriage and have a, have a biracial child, you know, an interracial marriage, have a biracial child and they just believe in equal rights. Well, I think equal rights are a good thing. I don't think things are on a continuum. I don't think, They may not be full blown Marxist. They just might believe in the equal rights and this is their way of expressing it for a reason. So don't judge them way over here until you know they're way over there. And I'll pull it back again. We saw people, this probably speaks to your friend, the Trump bumper sticker, MAGA bumper sticker, the MAGA hat, and people immediately go fascist, racist. They've really gone to that extreme, but maybe that person with that bumper sticker just believes in a strong national defense. And I think we all agree that a strong national defense is a good thing. So, so if there are things that are on this continuum, what you're seeing is the response is a polarized response. Yeah. Right. A polarizing response because polarization is, is intentionally created in psychological operations because in psychological operations, if I can get you to that polarized point, you're going to turn off your critical thinking skills. and you're gonna put yourself in a state of mind that feels like it's life or death. So polarization is really most of the time a manufactured sense of life and death. And that's what people are doing to themselves right now on social media. They're manufacturing a sense of life and death. When it's not, we're not there. Bombs are not dropping, okay? We do not have adversarial aircraft over our skies that are doing, that's not happening. Nobody's running down your street You know, you know, calling in artillery on your home. That's not happening. You're not in a life or death situation. You just feel like you are. So we've got to pull back that polarization because that goes to bad places, especially with the psychological operations. If I can get you to polarize and then I can get you to tribalize, well, then I'm going to pull you into dehumanize and now you're going to start killing people. So we've got to dial that whole thing way, way back because it leads to bad places.