Democrats Just Don’t Understand
One of my absolute favorite plays - primarily for the lesson that it teaches - is Sex and Education by Lissa Levin. We saw it back in 2014 at the Colony Theatre. Sex and Education tells the story of an English teacher (Miss Edwards) who is tired of teaching; a teacher who is quitting the profession to go sell real estate. It also tells the story of a horny high-school basketball playing senior, Joe, who has accepted a scholarship to North Carolina to play college basketball. It is three days before graduation, and Miss Edwards is administering the final exam in her English class (which includes Joe). She’s looking forward to getting out of the school, and intends just to pass everyone. But then she catches Joe passing a note to Hannah, a cheerleader who is also Joe’s girlfriend. The note is confused mix of topics including insulting the teacher, the test, and asking Hannah to have sex with him under the bleachers, given that she has given him a blowjob before. It is riddled with obscenity, bad grammar, poor sentence construction, and much more. Miss Edwards she asks Joe to stay after the test. What happens next is every English teacher’s dream. She works with Joe to write a proper persuasive essay to get Hannah to overcome her reluctance and sleep with him. The point of the play - and the reason I love it so - is that it teaches that a proper persuasive essay does not convince by presenting the reasons why you think the other person should do something, but presenting to the other person why it is in their interest to do something. In other words: you need to understand their point of view before you can convince them to anything.
With relation to Donald Trump, we Democrats just don’t understand. We are like a bunch of jocks surrounding the football player, convincing him that anyone would want to sleep with him because he is strong and sexy and the captain of the football team, without realizing that the cheerleader doesn’t care about any of that - she will only sleep with someone if it serves her needs, and the football player is uncouth and coarse and doesn’t bother to shower after the game, plus he tells everyone about who he slept with.
I was talking about his before last night’s concert with my wife, pointing out that the Democrats aren’t speaking a language that will convince Republicans that Donald Trump has to go. All the things we think they would care about - justice, American values, consistency with what they complained about with Obama - really have no meaning to the Republicans. They have other concerns, other things that Trump is speaking to. Until we can learn to speak in a way that they will listen, there will not be reconciliation (or even impeachment). Further, the divide is just getting greater, as the separation in our media views (in a database sense of a view) just increases the odds that anything we say will be written off.
And hence, this essay. My goal is to bring together a number of podcasts and articles that I have read that, just perhaps, might increase your awareness of what the other side is thinking and believing. Perhaps then we might be able to craft a way to talk such that we can convince them. All I know right now is that all the crap and memes and articles flowing across the “Blue” Facebook won’t do it.
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