Just Write

Today as I came in to write Brent asked me about a charge on the credit card. I didn't recognize it. He didn't recognize it. Started down the what could it be rabbit hole that ended up leading to freezing the card for fraud and we will have to start the process of changing over all of our automatic payments and thinking we have them all when we don't and something getting declined and being embarrassed when we get that call even though we didn't do anything wrong. 

Ugh.

Hate that. 

We've had to get new cards like 5 times over the past few years. Breaches in other companies that lead to the banks just shutting down all the cards, remember when Target was breached and EVERYONE had to get new cards? I can still remember the look on the customer service greeter's face at the credit union. So many new cards that had to be issued and so much mayhem while automatic payments were snarled. 

Life is super convenient when it's all set up to run automatically. Right up until something stops working. Then it's just a cascade of mess. 

And so the writing I was going to do got squashed. I can still sort of feel the edges of the story, but it's a weird one anyway so holding on to it has been a challenge under the best of circumstances. This morning wasn't the best. Along with still feeling under the weather the hassles of the fraud are not really conducive to creative writing. 

I'd like to be able to figure out how make the real world the part that gets tossed to the back of my brain so the creative writing gets to take up the front space. It would be so much more fun. Probably not all that great for Brent who already has to carry the majority of the practical space, but at least I'd have more fiction to print. (not thinking that would be a good balm for him)

So instead of a weird little fiction piece today you are going to get snippets of things playing around in my head. 

Finished a book yesterday that was supposed to be about persuading people. How to be more persuasive instead of argumentative in today's polarized world. It was interesting, in parts, but also not really what it was billed as. Two of the people they highlighted, for instance, were Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, don't get me wrong, I agree with most everything they both stand for, but they aren't really bringing anyone around to their points of view that wasn't already mostly there. Both of them have been successful in various ways of moving the left off of the center platform and getting them slightly more to the left. But neither of them budged the right from the right, except maybe to entrench them more as AOC has been made in to their new boogeywoman. 

There was also a section in there about deprogramming from cults and how we might really need to figure out a way to inoculate people from cult like thinking instead. Which is true, but they didn't really have any ideas as to how to accomplish that. So we are not going to find a way out of this Qanon world for awhile. 

And then to reinforce that I hadn't really picked up any new skills from the book I stumbled across a post on a friend's page this morning (it was a few days old so the conversations had all already finished, Facebook has taken to not showing me things until they are weeks old, including sending me notifications on my own page, it's just the Universe talking to me) ANYWAY...

So in this post my friend had a friend come in who was very pro-Trump. And they did the Pro-Trump talking point about how they get their news from a variety of places so they are better informed. It is a standard one for the right. "Oh I get my news from a variety of places not just what the main stream media wants me to see" like that's somehow better? Getting your "news" from three or four places that have no tie to reality makes it better. But if you show them that what they have been told is made up out of whole cloth they discount all of your sources as well. Even if you have people who testified under oath at the January 6th hearings and they have a blogger who likes to stir shit. Somehow you're the one who is being deceived.

And I get it, I do, we all have news sources we trust more than others, but part of what makes me distrust a news source is if I find they have either pushed an agenda or been flat out dishonest in the past. For instance, I don't read the New York Times. There have been enough times that they've pushed a narrative (for instance, their hatred for the Clintons) that has caused severe damage (reviewing Clinton Cash as if it weren't made up nonsense and posting that on the front page) at times that could do the most damage (posting that the FBI was reopening the case against HRC right before the election even though it was nothing). If you show me who you are, I'm going to believe you. 

But you have people who follow Fox News (who has had multiple times in court where they've used the "no reasonable person would believe this" as THEIR defense) or Alex Jones (he said it's just a character he plays and that nobody should believe him in his divorce case) or Dinesh D'Souza (had his book pulled at the last minute so the publisher wouldn't be sued by the people in it but people are still out there thinking his Mules movie is fact based). And when you show them that the things they are saying aren't true they wrap it up into the whole conspiracy theory and won't believe you anyway. 

Which was one of the points in the book. That you can't use facts to convince people they are wrong because they just dig in. Which I already knew. I've seen it in my own life and I've read other studies about it. But it didn't really leave me with what do you do answers. 

And I think that's because nobody knows what to do. Not all the time. 

Sometimes just giving another point of view starts the work. But only if people are really able to hear you. 

Sometimes giving a person face to what they have felt is an abstract argument helps. I've done that one with LGBTQ+ arguments for ages. 

Sometimes reframing what they are arguing against helps. Like often you hear their argument and it's not at all what anyone wants. Going to back to LGBTQ+ issues for instance. I used to have to reframe all the time when people would say that they weren't in favor of giving special rights to people. Nobody is looking for special rights, just equal rights. You, straight person, can't be discriminated at work for who you are married to, I want the same for everyone. You, straight person, can marry whatever consenting adult you want to. I want the same for everyone. You, straight/cis person, get to decide the medical care for you and for your cis children without the government stepping in. I want the same for everyone. 

It's not special rights, it's equal rights. And that has worked. Sometimes. Sometimes people think if it doesn't directly apply to them then it is special not equal. And I can't help with that. 

The person arguing with my friend doesn't believe anything that she doesn't already believe. She thinks the fact checkers are part of the conspiracy. She thinks the last election was stolen and that anyone who can't see that is just not paying attention. And there isn't a way to really move that needle. Not until something she sees doesn't make sense to her. She'll have to have a moment of doubt that starts the cards falling. But most of those people, when doubt creeps in, will go to the comfort of other people who think the same way they do and wrap themselves in that cocoon of "you're right and everyone else is wrong".

Mainly because it's hard to admit when you're wrong. It makes you feel dumb. Like how in the world could you not have seen it for so long? How did you buy into it at all? Instead of seeing that there are people out there working really hard to keep you believing. Is it easier to you to say, yeah I was wrong or no, you all are wrong?

Where do you feel most comfortable?

Because changing your mind is uncomfortable. You have to change everything to go along with it. 

Sort of like when your credit card gets frozen because of someone else's fraud. You didn't do anything wrong, but you are still left with the responsibility of getting it all fixed.