People don’t always agree with me, but I try not to vilify them simply because they don’t. It’s true I may think they are totally off base, but they may think my little gray cells are no more than low-grade insulating foam. Our differences can make communication interesting and challenging, but they should not be cause for war.
Life brings debate. We cannot live without forming opinions, and because we each have different experiences, those opinions do not always agree. However, labeling people who disagree with us as contemptible is nothing more than a tactic to win arguments. It often works, too, because no one in his right mind would want to agree with a terrible person and no one in his right mind wants to be thought of as the Devil, himself.
I remember watching two professionals on television argue over the cause and the cure of a certain issue. It soon became obvious that the two would never find common ground, which should have been okay, but it wasn’t, at least to one of them. Rather than simply agree to disagree and leave it at that, she sputtered, ”I never knew you were so narrow-minded!” When he said he wasn’t narrow-minded, that he just had a different viewpoint, she tried to finish him off by blurting, “It’s obvious you are very intolerant, and not a nice person.” In fact, she was the one being intolerant, and her behavior wasn’t “nice,” at all. She had been unable to persuade him, and since she could no longer mount an effective debate she resorted to a rhetorical form of scratching his eyes out.
It was a shameless underhanded maneuver. Since she couldn’t crack the idea, she attacked the person. It is a tactic used by people who are unable to effectively argue with those who disagree with them. It is cowardly, dishonest and unproductive. It is the sort of thinking that leads gang-bangers to vilify and shoot each other. It is also un-American.
Our ability to disagree with each other in a rational manner has always been one of the strengths of our culture. It has enhanced our progress and has been a blazing neon sign that proclaimed our freedom to the world. Within reason, no one told us what to do, what to say, or how to think. Everyone could speak his piece and it didn’t matter that others might not like what he had to say. For the most part he had the right to say it without fear of being conked on the head by someone who didn’t like it.
These days, however, it is too easy to equate disagreement with hatred. We have to guard against the trend of, “If you disagree with me, you are hateful and ugly and you deserve what I hope you get.” That practice has wormed its way into our communication and threatens to weaken us by making it scary to voice a dissenting opinion. We’re better off being able to call each other screwballs, to vehemently disagree, and to do so openly and honestly. To be unable to do so only invites oppression.
