Ever noticed...how much the equation changes, if you pull politics out of it (not to mention how much the conversation changes)?
You are left with something far more human to work with—like what you get when you are genuinely listening, instead of talking all the time.
So, what is it that seems to enable listening more than anything else? I would posit, compassion.
When compassion is not involved, you often get the opposite of listening...no respectful dialog between two parties—which is pretty much all we see right now in our collective political equation.
Unfortunately, it seems that even something like compassionate listening to another party (collective or individual) needs to be lead. In other words, our leaders must demonstrate and, in so doing, teach by example how to do this...how to be this. And this requires something of all us, that currently seems to be quite lacking; humility.
Intuitively, I think we know something is terribly wrong about the current approach. It has become just too easy for us to end up in the "they're the ones who are wrong, not me" ditch. (By the way, have you heard how evil "they" are...? Besides, the more we can talk about "them", especially with people like me or who think like "we" do, the better I can feel about myself.... OMG! I hope you can sense the sarcasm here. Unfortunately, even though this seems like a human-race problem, it makes it worse when it is believers who seem to fly this flag the highest.)
We cannot be compassionate, if we have never been willing to be humbled.
Is this why it feels doubly hard to change the equation?
