In another diary several people were talking about Hillary and Bernie taking a stage together to denounce the violence at Trump rallies, and another person replied with:
“This moment you describe comes later… After someone gets killed. Each event in its time. Done too soon and it's just politics. Done in the wake of tragedy you move a nation.” *(See note at bottom)
As I replied I thought my answer might warrant a diary, so here it goes:
You mean a tragedy like Sandy Hook, that the far right said never happened or was staged to take their guns away?
I fear that there won’t be a single incident that changes this. Violence has been escalating- the list of young black men is too long to even try to name, and we are adding women, poor, and mentally challenged people to it daily as well. The protests and the tactics we are using are the right ones, but we are not being heard enough.
I have mentioned this a couple of times before, and I think it is getting more important. In high school we were shown a film with a bunch of made up words shown in random fonts and order, and each was shown a different number of times. After watching it we were given a list of those same words, and we were to mark whether we thought the word meant something good or something bad. We did so, then tallied the results.
Every one of us thought words we had seem more often were good, and that things we had seen only once or twice were dangerous. My theory is that this goes back to instinct, where something new is likely to pose a threat, but if you see it several times and live to remember it, your brain slowly re-categorizes it to non-threat.
All of the violence we have seen on TV, both fiction and on the news, has desensitized us to it to a large degree. Then the far right wing talking points over the last several years have gotten more attention than anything else, which leads to things like so many people believing the less than 3% of climate change deniers more than the 97% speaking the truth.
And now we have Trump News 24/7. There are more people given more time telling the public that it was the protesters causing the violence, that they should be the ones punished. And we see the cops doing so. And Trump calls for more violence again. When this is the image they see over and over, people start to believe it.
According to my knowledge of psychology, this will not lead to people suddenly ‘waking up’ when the violence leads to death. It is more likely to stir them up, like seeing the bad guy get killed at the end of a movie. Even those of us who don’t like violence like seeing the bad guy get his, right?
The answer isn’t to ignore it all either. The protests are good, they are needed. And if the protesters are attacked, they (we) have every right to defend themselves. I don’t think rolling over and taking it will change any more minds or hearts than combating it. The more people see that others are willing to stand up to Trump the more they will feel free to stand up to him as well.
Besides, that starts getting our side out in the media. I think the only thing that will change the public viewpoint is more people calling it out than defending it. More time must be given to logic and peace and science than to fear and hatred and violence.
It is exactly the same reason huge companies who make billions of dollars spend millions of it on running the same ads over and over. Things we see and hear over and over get through our filters to that alligator brain that says ‘that which does not kill me must be good.’ Study after study shows it takes up to 20 times of seeing the same message before they buy.
People who hear Bernie’s message for the first time say it must be wrong. When they hear it for the 5th time they say it sounds good but it must be impossible to achieve. When they hear it for the 10th time they say, ‘I want that for me too.’
The only way to make the violence less acceptable is to say it is not acceptable more often than the people defending it are heard. The way to get people to hear the truth about climate change, about income inequality, about #BLM, is to get those words spoken more often than the messages of hatred and ‘the other is to blame.’
We cannot depend on MSM to help us, although as more and more reporters (even those positive to Trump) are attacked, they may start talking more about it. I already see a few of them saying they feel afraid at Trump rallies, and realizing that they are already on Trump’s list of ‘people who are bad.’ He has already called for violence against reporters.
There are things we can do, too. Share facts on Facebook. Use graphs, share emotional videos (emotions are more effective in changing minds than facts, unfortunately, so use them.)
Talk to your friends, your families, and your community. Show them your passion, your love for peace, your fear for what our world might look like. Post the videos that show who threw the first punch. Show Trump’s words calling for violence once, then show people calling for peace 10 times. Make our message the one people see enough to believe it is the right one for them.
The brownshirt types will not care. They like the messages of hatred and violence. But many people who support Trump are not brownshirts, they are people who are afraid and hurting, and Trump tells them he will help them and tells them who to turn their fear against. Some of those people are reachable. The more we speak an alternative story, the more people have two choices of messages instead of just the one they are being fed. Give them a story of hope instead of one of fear and hatred.
Some of those sitting on the sidelines can be reached also. Those who see the violence and dislike it, but don’t know what to do about it. Tell them your hopes for the future. Show them there can be a better world. Tell them about Bernie’s plans. (Or Hillary’s plans if you prefer.) Show them there is a way out of the darkness that doesn’t mean embracing the darkness to get there.
And tell them about what Trump does to his own employees. I hear people say, ‘He is a good business man. He will bring jobs.’ Show them his record. He will not bring them a living wage. Tell them about Bernie’s promise of a $15 minimum wage (or Hillary’s $12). Tell them their lives can be better without them having to take something away from someone else to get it.
Tell them that hope is more powerful than fear, and tell them until they can hear it over the roar of the media’s words of hatred.
Make the future the one you want it to be by telling your story louder and longer and more often than they champions of hatred tell theirs. We can do it together.
*(I didn’t use names of the people in the other diary because I didn’t ask permission to, not because I was not trying to give them credit.)