A Bit Of Thought: Building bridges

I recently attended a talk on geopolitics by political pundit Dr. Richard Heydarian. He talked about how the development of a nation is fueled by policies and not culture. But that wasn’t the biggest insight I got.

During the open forum, I asked him, “Behind every bad leader is a majority that voted for him. Has the majority failed us? Is democracy dead?”

He said, and I paraphrase here, “There is a reason why people voted for Duterte, for Trump, for Brexit. I think what we need to learn from them is that we need to start listening to the other side. We can never move forward if we continue to demonize their opinions.”

And to be honest, he’s right. This year has been marked by a huge backlash of the silent majority. There’s a huge part of the population that we normally don’t care about, because they care about different issues than we do or they have different principles. In many ways, Duterte and Trump are protest votes by a portion of the population that’s sick of the status quo.

You might say that the status quo is good enough. But the problem is that people only think the status quo is good if it’s good for them.

For every middle-class family enjoying the benefits of the Aquino administration, there is a poor family left behind.

For every victim of the Marcos regime, there is a family that prospered under their reign.

For every Californian with a stable job in the immigrant-fueled tech industry, there is a Texan who fears their manufacturing job might be outsourced to China.

The current state of society leaves many people out of the picture, and it would be selfish for us to not take their opinions into account. That isn’t saying that their opinions are wrong, or right, or are the correct solutions going forward. But we do have to realize that democracy is built on the opinions of the populace, and as long as we keep on fighting with the other side, democracy will never work. There must be at least some understanding of where the Marcos apologist, the pro-Trump voter, or the Duterte fanatic comes from. Their opinions and their concerns are as valid as ours. It is through understanding the other side that we can think about how to fix the gap that exists between us.

Society keeps on telling us to burn bridges. Why don’t we start building them instead?