Dialogue
in Red and Blue
by
Valerie Uccellani
Many
of us "specialists" in dialogue have been doing a pretty lousy job lately
at having true dialogue with others--even family members or old friends--who voted
differently than we did in the recent elections. In fact, our expert facilitation
skills seem to shrivel into a useless heap in the emotion of it all. We start
off with some good open questions, but then our ears close, our minds close, and
hearts struggle to stay open. I think we would do our country--and our own selves--a
world of good if we could find a way to build our dialogue across lines of red
and blue.
What might help? Well, I've been thinking a lot lately about
how Duality Destroys Dialogue. I think of duality as the false sense that I'm
separate from you--that I'm "other than." I can fool myself into thinking
that when I'm angry at you, I'm angry at something outside of myself. But, really,
the hardest part of all this is that, when we're angry at others, we're often
angry at ourselves -- our own ignorance, our own confusion, our own fear. If we
could get in better touch with this, I think we could listen better, and exchange
some real "words between us" -- even across the emotional " color"
lines of red and blue.
Join us at the
Dialogue Education
Institute Conference in May for a session entitled "Dialogue across the
Political Color Lines" where we'll explore ways to make dialogue happen at
this tense time in history--with strangers, and even more importantly, with the
people we love.
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