Failure to communicate: Angry, bitter people misunderstand each other

By David McElroy · August 29, 2011

I did very few things in my political work over the years that I’m ashamed of, but one case sticks out. I was simply helping a client try to win a campaign — and I made $10,000 doing it — but it was just plain wrong. It’s done all the time, though, and most people don’t realize it’s wrong.

I’m not going to mention names because I feel as though that would be unfair to people who paid me to work for them, but the names don’t matter. I was doing some last-minute work for a state gubernatorial campaign. My candidate was the incumbent, but he was weak and expected to lose. Those around the campaign were desperate for ideas and willing to throw money at the problem.

Some in the campaign leadership were obsessed with tying the opponent to a bunch of ’60s radicals. They had very shaky grounds for doing so, but the facts didn’t seem to matter. I produced a direct mail piece that went to hundreds of thousands of people that was accurate insofar as the facts it stated, but was dishonest in the implications it made. I’m ashamed of it, but that didn’t stop me from cashing the check.

The mailer used pictures of radical left-wing figures from the ’60s. More accurately stated, it included people who conservatives would see as those radicals. For instance, it included a picture of Jane Fonda in North Vietnam when she did made the trip that led to her being labeled Hanoi Jane. It was a cast of characters designed to make conservatives angry — and to link their anger at that to the guy we were trying to beat.

It was a case of stating the facts while telling a lie. We were appealing to anger that people had about other people who they misunderstood. In systems where you have no choice other than to gain the support of a majority, you sometimes have no pragmatic choice other than to shock and anger people in order to manipulate them to vote the way you want them to, but all it does is win an immediate battle. It doesn’t help in the long term.

I thought about that mailer again last weekend when I saw controversy involving U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California. She’s one of those lightning rods that conservatives love to hate, and it’s hard to blame them. She comes across as arrogant, condescending, stupid and mean-spirited to me. She said this last week at a public meeting in California:

“This is a tough game. You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be frightened. And as far as I’m concerned — the tea party can go straight to hell.”

Conservatives don’t understand her anger, but it’s equally clear that she doesn’t understand their anger, either. Sadly, each side only sees things from its own point of view. It doesn’t help when someone such as conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage says that “liberalism is a mental disorder.” There’s no conversation. There’s no attempt to understand. There’s only anger and bitterness and personal animosity. It wins elections, but it divides a country and makes it angrier — especially when media is there to amplify the anger to become public entertainment.

Things don’t have to be this way, but they’re going to continue to be this way as long as we have the coercive state. The “winner take all” system requires that anyone who wants to do anything has to work up an angry mob of 51 percent. Some pundits want to see it as an aberration, but it’s actually a feature of the system.

We don’t all hate each other over what restaurants we love and we don’t typically have screaming matches over which groceries to buy. So why do we do it over which health care to buy? Or which weapons to build and buy? Or which people to hand out money to in various other parts of life?

It’s simple. We each make a choice for ourselves when it comes to restaurants and groceries. We respect the idea that other people want something different from what we want. It wouldn’t occur to the vast majority of us to demand laws requiring everyone to eat the same foods. But when it comes to what governments buy, it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. If our group doesn’t win the right to force its view on everybody, we don’t get what we want. People with different views feel the same way.

As long as we have a coercive state requiring everyone to be the same — in increasingly large parts of life — we’re going to continue having angrier and angrier people. We’re not going to defuse this ticking time bomb until we understand that we all want different things. We need to allow others to make their own choices, even when we disagree with them.

I know this isn’t a popular view. I could make far more people happy by railing against the people some political group disagrees with. I know how to push political buttons to make people angry. It would certainly get more readers, because people share things that say what they already agree with. I could do that, but I won’t.

Maybe I don’t have the stomach for it. And maybe I’ve seen that it’s not consistent with my personal and spiritual values. And maybe it’s because I now see a better way — a way that can work for everyone.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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