Listening to Our Enemy
If we Try to Understand our Enemies can we Love Them?
Bell Hooks makes the argument that without placing love within the struggles of oppression there isn’t a chance for more people to be converted into loving individuals. Love in the context, for me at least, is being able to understand where the “other” side of the conversation is coming from and being able to respect their opinion. With today’s political climate, the act of choosing to love the “other,” or oppressor’s, side is nearly impossible. We, as humans, are emotional beings, and it is harder for some people to do. In the social media age, it is easy to spread love and dialogue over media such as YouTube and Twitter, but for some reason there is always resistance in the discourse between two opposite positions.
Talking to Twitter
When there is an attack on a group of individuals, the first action some people will do is to go to social media, specifically twitter. Twitter is used for people to spread love in 140 characters or less. People can bring awareness to any situation for millions of strangers at hand to come together and unify. Yes, there are racist/misogynistic tweets, but for the most part people tend to call out those racist and try to have a conversation with them. Recently, there have been a zero tolerance for these racist post, and people are trying to interfere with their jobs and personal lives. I can understand, especially with today’s political climate, why people would not want to talk to people who are against them. It is not easy to set aside emotions to have a productive discussion about why people stand where they stand. Not only is it hard on the emotional aspect, but it is harder for productive conversation to occur when both parties are hostile to one another.
The Issues with the Feminist and Anti-Feminist Community on YouTube
Recently, feminist content creator Laci Green released a video discussing how she is going to start talking to members of the Anti-Feminist and Anti-Social Justice Warrior groups. Her main goal for her dialogue is to mainly to create an understanding between the two extreme ideologies. Dialogue is important for there to create a “culture of conversion.” The conversion is not going to make someone switch between sides of being a feminist or ant-feminist, but it would create a culture of love and understanding. But, as she mentioned in her follow up video, there has been resistance in her craving for dialogue between the two different camps. The trend, as Green mentions in her video, is that both camps are skeptic of her underlying intentions in talking to the other camp. For some reason, it seems people tend to think of the worse in people when it comes to actions, as if everyone is putting up their Trojan horse.
Is it possible to practice love easier?
In the case of Twitter, patience and tolerance are the keys to have that medium of social media to be a space for converting people to look to love for resolutions. While on YouTube, content creators and viewers need to let go of their predisposition of the opposite ideology to respect new ideas and positions on issues. Pointing out the problems to find solutions to push toward a culture of conversion to a more loving culture is the simple part. The difficulty is trying to find a method to put the theory into practice, so that there is some way to find a way toward the culture of love. I tend to react with anger over racist, homophobic, and misogynistic remarks or comments. I normally don’t know what to do in order to attempt to making a space for understanding of the other person who will not want to see eye to eye. The optimistic side of me wants to believe that people will eventually change to be open to the idea of converting to the culture of love. Realistically, some people will really fall in love with their own ideas and perception of the world to ignore the other side of the argument. With all of the blaming and distrust within the different social platforms, I feel like the one girl from Mean Girls, and I just wish everyone will accept each others differences to make a culture of love a norm.
