UNDERSTANDING TRUMPS CONVINCING

He shot his horse right between its, big, trusting, brown eyes.

I managed to turn my head all but once while attempting to avoid seeing the video. The image of that scene was shown much too often on local TV news. The man (and I’m stretching the term) was making a point regarding some controversy over a horse slaughter house in southern New Mexico.

I eat hamburgers and I know the meat doesn’t come from chopped beef plants, but in my world there is just something inherently wrong with calling your perfectly healthy, innocent horse to you then blowing that spirit away.

 The man (whom I will non-judgmentally call Mr. Douchbag) was not prosecuted because it was his horse, he put him down “humanely,” and slaughtered him for his own consumption.  The act was not legally wrong, but to me it just ain’t right.  I can’t imagine, short of my family starving, that I could do such a thing.

What Mr. D did was not a liberal or conservative act. I have no idea what his political leanings are. Viewing life as he does just demonstrates to me how we can all think so differently about life’s basic issues. To him it was perfectly OK to kill a living creature to call attention to his cause. To me, I can think of few acts as despicable. 

The reason I bring up this gory story is to state the obvious: it is very difficult, if not impossible, given the diversity of thought in this country, for either political side to intellectually convince the other side to change their views. Yet in our political discourse that is exactly what we try to do. I know there are stated and registered Independents who can theoretically be swayed either to the left or the right, but I believe most of them actually are not “independent.” It just sounds correct to wait and examine all the fact and then vote for who will best serve the country.

Truthfully, much of our political ideology has been arrived at emotionally and will not be changed intellectually, yet we continually and frustratingly, try to get people with very different belief systems to see things our way. I can’t begin to imagine what DB would have to say to me, or what statistics he could provide, that would gain my acceptance of his cold blooded killing.

I really believe the best we can hope to gain in left/right discussions is to understand.

When conversing with the “other” side, don’t try for acceptance; shoot (pardon the pun) for understanding. While this is very easy to say, it is very difficult to do because we feel so strongly about our beliefs, and we can’t understand why others can’t see the pure logic of our position. Naturally it’s difficult for us to inactivate our conversion gene for even a little while.

Some people may be open for some mind changing. But it is a waste of valuable understanding time to, for example,  try to convince someone who believes that life begins at conception, that abortions is acceptable. It’s difficult to make someone who has owned and loved horses to understand that snuffing out the life of one of nature’s most majestic animals to make a statement, is ever justified.

I know some beliefs of others are just flat out hard to understand but shouldn’t understanding others be easier? I guess it’s like the title of an Iris DeMent song, Easy’s Gettin Harder Every Day.