We have to be better and make space for people’s fear.
When people express extreme or callous or hateful views, I have to pause. I have to check myself and see what fears are in my own heart about this stated belief. If we’re lucky and not a little bit patient to allow time for “Way to open” (as our Quaker siblings are wont to say), this can create an opportunity.
People don’t really care about facts, and they certainly don’t care about your statistics, rhetorical flair, or the logical hoops you think they’ll be incapable of jumping through. They often don’t want you to engage their view oppositionally, but are hoping you’ll laugh along with them and affirm the fears they’ve long held about the alternatives that have been made invisible in their life.
Ultimately, they’ve fallen into a story. They have become entirely comfortable with the worldview, paradigms, and tales out of which they live life. They find themselves mired in the swamp of certainty because ambiguity is scary. Uncertainty is anathema. Doubt and the exploration of questions taboo or unasked shakes the core of the life they’ve begun to build around themselves.
But if we pause… if we examine our own fears… if we lean in and seek to sit with another person in their pain and terror at what may change, what may go wrong, what may have to happen in their lives to accommodate the opposite conclusion they’ve been sneering at and avoiding entertaining with their full faculties… then maybe their is an opportunity to, not change their minds, but to open their hearts…