She was just staring at me.
She had something to say,
and I could tell she was curious about the Free Listening sign, but she
didn’t seem to have to courage to speak to me.
Yet.
So, I waited. Nowhere to be, and all day to get there.
It was so hot outside.
Finally, she walked up, and like a young warrior preparing for battle, she said:
“I
don’t usually do this, and I know this isn’t a hot button topic
anymore… But, I think abortion is wrong. It’s not a form of birth
control, and people who have them should be arrested for murder."
Most
protesters at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland were
yelling about Donald Trump—for or against—all part of this beautiful
circus of free speech.
She was different. There was no circus here. She was serious.
I had been Free Listening at the RNC for a few hours, and most people who spoke with me told me about
their families, their jobs, and the things that brought them to Cleveland.
No one had opened up about a serious, but controversial issue.
But here she was.
It was so hot outside.
http://urbanconfessional.org/blog/howtodisagree
“We have to start listening to people. If we don’t, we’re in trouble.”
11/09/2016 03:15 am ET
|
Updated
Nov 09, 2016
Conservative commentator
Glenn Beck said during NBC’s
election coverage that the problem facing the nation right now is that “we don’t listen to each other and we don’t trust each other.”
“I don’t think we’ve listened to each other at all, and I know I’ve been at fault on this,” he admitted Tuesday night.
Beck, founder of The
Blaze, also said people no longer trust the media “because they view us
as speaking down to them, pontificating, telling them and not listening
to them.”
He pointed out that most supporters of
Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton aren’t happy about the candidate they voted for.
“On both sides, the parties have to realize now, ‘Boy we need to
start reflecting the people and listening to the people.’ Because the
people are entering a time as we’re seeing tonight beyond reason.
they’re not listening. and when you get into so much fear and so much
anger, the mind’s mechanism is to just shut down reason and they’re not
listening to reason ― and we have got to find our way to each other.”
Beck said in the coming year he wants to meet with the people he disagrees with most, and just listen.
“We have to start listening to people,” he concluded. “If we don’t, we’re in trouble.”
Beck, once a voice from the fringes of the far right, has lately been trying to strike a more conciliatory tone.
Earlier this week, he told the New Yorker that he
empathizes with the Black Lives Matters movement and said he was too hard on President Barack Obama.
“I did a lot of freaking out about Barack Obama,” Beck told the magazine. But, he added, “
Obama made me a better man.”
Click here to read full article
But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent
resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is
the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we look out across the
years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We
must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of
love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old
world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only
way. Jesus discovered that
Every time I go to these racial forums, it is people who are alike,
or it is progressives and liberals," she says. "So I said, 'At some
point, we've got to bring the progressives and the liberals and the
conservatives together.’"
The guest list for the forum, titled
“Let’s Bridge the Racial Divide across Urban, Suburban and Rural
America," includes more than a dozen divergent voices, from social
justice activists to a neo-Confederate.
Some of those featured are
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former South Carolina state Sen. Bakari Sellers,
activist Mary Pat Hector, a Sons of Confederate Veterans member, and
former Klu Klux Klansman Scott Shephard.
“He’s coming because one
of the gentlemen that we invited, a black gentleman, has been meeting
with and engaging the Klan,” King explains. “He said, ‘How do you hate
me, when you don’t know me as a black man?’
“So he said, 'I want
to go and connect with them.' And that's what he's done, and he’s seen
about 25 of them leave the Klan and turn their robes over to him.”
“How can you hate me if you don’t even know me?”
Daryl Davis asks in the new documentary “Accidental Courtesy.”
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