How to deal with twisted rhetorics?
For a long time I have thought that my lack of communication with my mother was due at least for half of it to my unwillingness or inability to explain things to her, while I have dedicated my life to a job that consists exactly in helping people understand. So, I have been struggling to break down that wall of incomprehension by making genuine efforts to communicate, but I always end up crashing on her part of the wall, in ways sometimes comic, sometimes grotesque.
Today my father, who has been a butcher all his life, said something about camel meat. My mother was horrified. We tried to explain her that it must not be different from any other kind of meat, and then she started raving about Chinese people eating rats and Chinese restaurants, and when I tried to tell her she was missing the point, she said: "And yet you eat at Chinese restaurants!".
A few minutes later, a discussion about immigrants started: she was complaining about immigrants taking money from us. Since all my past efforts to make her understand something about immigrants (and especially that she IS an immigrant as well) have always failed, I tried the emotional card, saying: "You know, when I go to Turkey, I find people so poor they don't have a roof, and yet, the little they have, they offer it to you". Her reply was: "Well, they are used to it!".
Now, apart from my personal relationship with my mother, the most horrifying consequence of all this is that, no matter how many efforts I do in my work, there will always be someone who understands just what they want to understand. And I wonder: is it worth it? Is it worth to spend so much time writing a book against prejudices about Turkey? The answer, of course, is yes, because, luckily, not everybody is like this, and if prejudices are often the source of ignorance, sometimes it is the other way round, so fighting ignorance is fighting prejudices. But I must not delude myself, I must keep in mind that much of my efforts will be lost in an ocean of prejudices.
Today my father, who has been a butcher all his life, said something about camel meat. My mother was horrified. We tried to explain her that it must not be different from any other kind of meat, and then she started raving about Chinese people eating rats and Chinese restaurants, and when I tried to tell her she was missing the point, she said: "And yet you eat at Chinese restaurants!".
A few minutes later, a discussion about immigrants started: she was complaining about immigrants taking money from us. Since all my past efforts to make her understand something about immigrants (and especially that she IS an immigrant as well) have always failed, I tried the emotional card, saying: "You know, when I go to Turkey, I find people so poor they don't have a roof, and yet, the little they have, they offer it to you". Her reply was: "Well, they are used to it!".
Now, apart from my personal relationship with my mother, the most horrifying consequence of all this is that, no matter how many efforts I do in my work, there will always be someone who understands just what they want to understand. And I wonder: is it worth it? Is it worth to spend so much time writing a book against prejudices about Turkey? The answer, of course, is yes, because, luckily, not everybody is like this, and if prejudices are often the source of ignorance, sometimes it is the other way round, so fighting ignorance is fighting prejudices. But I must not delude myself, I must keep in mind that much of my efforts will be lost in an ocean of prejudices.