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I Believe We Can Talk __ P o l i ____ t i c s __  Samuel Erhart



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I believe we can talk politics. I believe we can talk without yelling, without violence , ** without **** ANGER **. I believe a fair and honest dialog exists because everyone, regardless of political preference or background, desires some sort of societal progress. Yet we allow politics to remain a taboo dinner subject, allow slanderous and hurtful words into our political dialog and do almost nothing to try and understand each other. Some talking has already started, and people have become disgusted with the violent rhetoric. I believe that what I have to say can work to help people to talk with disagreeable people, because discourse will help to make the best policies for this countries bright future.

I believe people’s opinions are based on attitudes that make up their identity, this is why political discussion can get so heated– to them it can be like you are directly insulting the person you are talking to. This makes it extremely important to try and figure out what these attitudes are when you’re talking to the person. So you should start your dialog by listening to what they believe before you try to confront and challenge them. Keep quizzing them on what they believe, if they say they do not believe in raising taxes for the rich; ask them, “Why do you believe that?” This forces them to work through exactly what it is that they believe and know, and it should make them more comfortable and less likely to respond with anger.

Once you feel confident that they are done speaking, you can share your opinions on whatever the subject is (this is optional). It’s optional because people like to live their lives in their own narrative, confronting them with a direct and opposing narrative might cause them to not listen to you. The most important part is working with the person to fine tune their beliefs. No one person has a complete knowledge of our world, use this to your advantage. Use facts to support and question the opinions of the person you are talking to. Because of how passive this discussion can be, you can really have amazing conversations with people you greatly disagree with. For example, I myself am quiet liberal but through this template for discussion have been able to convince a libertarian, someone strongly against any federal government, (they’re famous for wanting to repeal the income tax) that we should try to generate more tax revenue in order to pay back our debts.

There is a big misunderstanding about how political dialog should be. Most people try to go into it with guns blazing, throwing facts around, interrupting each other and being down right rude. The reality is that that attitude will never help us to work together in creating constructive solutions to our many problems. Rather, if we simple listened and talked with each other, we could come up with the answers to so many problems that currently stump us. This I believe.

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Audio was difficult for me, I did my audio on my roommates Macbook on garage band. I took multiple recordings of each of my paragraphs and then went through and messed a little with the volume and edited out strange sounds and strange pauses. The picture I chose is one that I had found and fell in love with a few years ago, I thought it would work well here because it causes people to stop and read it. I also hope the picture reminds people of times when they felt like they were surrounded by people they disagreed with. I chose to bold the words i did because if someone was to skim my paper instead of read it, I thought by bolding what i did I could tell enough of my story that they would understand my point.