Survive This God-Awful Election With the Rules of Road House
Be the Dalton you wish to see in the world.
Look, 2016 is an objectively terrible year. These tweets from the AP Stylebook wouldn’t be so popular if referring to everything—the election cycle, the candidates, the RNC, and the year in general—as a dumpster fire wasn’t the purest linguistic trend of this abysmal go around the sun and everything it’s put us through.
In addition to the deaths of basically everyone you had your first makeout to (some of you went to first base while watching Harry Potter movies! Admit it!) this year feels like a grueling combination of self-flagellation and a slow poisoning because of this fucking election.
This. Fucking. Election.
And we’ve all got coping mechanisms. For some of us it’s definitely not Bailey’s over cereal (but it for sure is). For others it’s rambling on Twitter. Some of us are opting out altogether (DON’T DO THAT) and others are soothing the many, many burns with memes and gifs and the sweet melodies of people who confirm our own beliefs in the world.
But regardless of where you fall on the ideological spectrum—yes, even you third party people—I believe there is a nonpartisan solution that we all can rally around to make it through this without killing each other.
The Rules of Road House.
For the ~Millennials~ out there who are perhaps not familiar with this thrilling 1989 action classic (I was two years old when it came out; sorry you just died of old age), it’s basically just a movie about extortion and murder and Southern people and Patrick Swayze doing the most. A lot of people think it’s pretty bad but then a lot of people like a lot of bad things, so it’s really down to personal taste as to whether or not you regard it as an artful piece of cinema or just a reason to exercise your P. Sway thirst.
However. Regardless of whether or not you believe Road House is like, a quality film or not, I firmly believe that the dogma espoused by professional cooler James Dalton could serve as a galvanizing force in this especially polarized year.
If you need a refresher, here’s the part where Dalton lays down the rules.
To recap, the rules are:
- Never underestimate your opponent.
- Take it outside.
- Be nice.
“But Hanna,” I can hear you whinging from behind your laptop screen, “how are these rules going to help me tread through the mire of this turd stew of an election, wherein everything hurts and I feel like I’m dying?”
To which I would say: It’s simple. Let’s go through it point-by-point.
Never underestimate your opponent.
Say you’re on Twitter and you see some dum-dum say something about a candidate and you just. Do not. Agree. Like, it’s so wrong. IT IS SO. FUCKING. WRONG. It’s so wrong you can’t even deal. You have to respond.
But wait! Just as your fingers are about to swiftly type out a sexist retort or an otherwise personal insult at this complete and utter bonehead who clearly knows so much less than you do about the subject, you remember Dalton’s words: Never underestimate your opponent.
By assuming that a person has arrived at what you believe to be an incorrect conclusion or belief, you are underestimating them.
Here is a secret about most everyone: We don’t believe we’re uninformed. Chalk it up to the Dunning-Kruger effect or maybe the fact that, I don’t know, to survive this terrible world we have to comfort ourselves with the belief that we’re not just bumbling through the world with our eyes shut in the dark like a hotel guest who can’t find the light switch, but most people assume that they are at least relatively smart.
Which means to have a conversation that is at all respectful or pleasant or productive, you have to assume the same. Enter every conversation with the assumption that other people are as smart as you are, as capable of empathy and critical thought.
Don’t underestimate people just because they disagree with you — or because you think they’re lacking some kind of nuance that you, yourself, possess solely and are tasked with spreading at every turn. Assume that they are as smart as you are, as clever and as well-informed, and we’ll all be better off.
Take it outside.
Say what you will about the “Bernie Bro” trope (and I’m sure you’ll have a lot to say!) but one of the unifying qualities of the criticism about Bernie Sanders supporters in the lead-up to the primary elections in this nation was the uncanny ability by many (but not all!) to digitally pile on, often leaping feet-first into unrelated subjects and derailing the conversation.
This, I would say, is the opposite of taking it outside. Taking it outside, in this context, means knowing the time and place to insert yourself. Or maybe just not inserting yourself. Have the conversation in person. Begin a new conversation. And for the love of all of our ability to survive this year, be courteous of someone’s decision not to engage with you about it.
An example: Though you may be itching to respond to a friend’s Facebook status with your own opinion, remember that their status is not there for you. They are just having a regular afternoon and, in all honestly, are probably not looking for a fight today.
Here’s another. Way back in 2012, Rebecca Solnit described a familiar kind of interaction that probably all of us have experienced online in the last year:
I constantly encounter a response that presumes the job at hand is to figure out what’s wrong, even when dealing with an actual victory, or a constructive development. Recently, I mentioned that California’s current attorney general, Kamala Harris, is anti-death penalty and also acting in good ways to defend people against foreclosure. A snarky Berkeley professor’s immediate response began, “Excuse me, she’s anti-death penalty, but let the record show that her office condoned the illegal purchase of lethal injection drugs.”
Apparently, we are not allowed to celebrate the fact that the attorney general for 12 percent of all Americans is pretty cool in a few key ways or figure out where that could take us. My respondent was attempting to crush my ebullience and wither the discussion, and what purpose exactly does that serve?
This kind of response often has an air of punishing or condemning those who are less radical, and it is exactly the opposite of movement or alliance building. Those who don’t simply exit the premises will be that much more cautious about opening their mouths. Except to bitch, the acceptable currency of the realm.
Showing up to a conversation simply to point out the negative—why they’re wrong, why you’re right, or what they clearly are leaving out—underestimates your opponent’s intelligence and brings it into their house, so to speak.
Because by doing this, you assert your own desire to “have a dialog” over the original speaker’s potential desire not to do that.
I had an interaction a while back wherein this was very clear. I tweeted a silly thing (and yes I am aware that I got the name of John Oliver’s show incorrect; that was on purpose and part of the joke but you knew that already, right?) about mansplaining after numerous men in my life entered into my feeds—on Facebook, Twitter, and later, over email and direct message—to explain something to me that I was very much already aware of.
The reaction—mostly from men—was that I was shutting down conversations with an attitude like this. That what they were trying to do wasn’t mansplain—they just wanted to have a dialog! They wanted to have a conversation with me!
What that is overlooking, though, is the fact that:
a. I don’t always want to have a conversation when other people want to and in fact, I rarely do because my feed is full of people trying to have a conversation and I have a life to live outside of the internet, and
b. By assuming that I must want to have a conversation—that the conversation necessarily is good for me and would add something to my life—you are effectively favoring your time over mine. You have decided that you know what’s best for me, and that the best use of my time is to hijack my web space with your own narrative or objectives.
I want to be perfectly clear here, though—taking it outside does not mean taking it to direct message or email. If a person clearly does not want to talk to you about politics or the elections, do not attempt another platform. If anything, that’s taking it further inside.
If you can’t have the conversation in person the next time you see the person, “taking it outside” means having your own conversation on your own time with yourself and others who have clearly expressed a desire to do so.
In short: Taking it outside means go blog about it. Write your own Facebook status. Start your own tweetstorm.
Be nice.
Seriously, just try being nice to each other. Try it. Try it until, as Dalton so eloquently says, “until it’s time to not be nice.”
Which is to say, you don’t have to be nice to everyone. Some people frankly do not deserve niceness. That doesn’t mean you have to be not-nice back, but it does mean you don’t always have to be nice when someone comes at you and, say, does not take it outside.
But still, you should try. I thoroughly and passionately believe that most of the time, the best response is to just block people who are not being nice and move the fuck along. And if you get blocked? It’s probably because you were not being nice. Deal with it. Be nicer moving forward.
And be nice to people who you see are the target of not-nice-ness; see a pile-on? Support the person being piled onto. It really does feel good to know you’re not being swallowed into a black hole of negativity alone day in and day out.
These rules, of course, do not soothe the constant, existential pain that many of us are feeling this year and, particularly, as we grow closer to the election. We’re just a few weeks out, after all, and then it’ll be November and, win, lose, or draw, the planet will likely not be a burning inferno in the immediate aftermath, which means we need to keep right on living elbow-to-elbow.
But I think they help. And heaven knows we could all use a little help right about now.
