3 Signs Your Conversation on Opposing Views Will Not Be Productive
And why you should give up on it.
Following the 2016 US election, I started paying more attention to what my mom’s cousins had to say on Facebook. Before then, I had scanned over their (often sexist or racist) ramblings, but suddenly it became more relevant.
I started sincerely engaging with them. I wanted to learn. I thought they had real grievances that I was unaware of. One cousin told me Obama had ruined her business, and I asked her how so, and if she could point to a federal policy. Honest to God, I believed I had something to learn from her.
Instead, her response was a jumbling of unrelated anti-Obama, all caps rhetoric. If you didn’t know she was a real person and sitting somewhere in southern Illinois, then you’d think she was a Russian bot. Slowly I figured out she was actually a full-time Facebook user, and didn’t have a clue about her husband’s family business.
Being so, I still learned a lot from my mom’s cousins — just not it the way I thought I would. For example, I used to be bright-eyed and believing that everyone came from a good place. I used to think that we all had different experiences and ideas and were interested in learning and growing.
