wrote

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/u...ebuilders.html

They Have Worked on Conflicts Overseas.
Now These Americans See 'Red Flags' at Home.

But are just ignorant fools.

By Sabrina Tavernise, Feb. 4, 2019, NY Times

LEVERETT, Mass. - Paula Green has spent much of her life
working on conflicts abroad. In places like Bosnia, Rwanda
and Myanmar, Dr. Green, an American psychologist, brings
together survivors of war, helping them see past their
differences so they can live with one another again.

But recently, she began seeing some warning signs in the
United States, flashes of social distress that she recognized
from her work abroad, and after 29 years of peacemaking in
other places, she decided to turn her lens on her own society.

She has no 'lens'

"People are making up stories about 'the other' - Muslims,
Trump voters, whoever 'the other' is," she said. "'They don't
have the values that we have. They don't behave like we do.
They are not nice. They are evil.'"

Corse nothing like that ever happened in the past in the US
with blacks, hispanics, the irish in the 1800s etc etc etc eh ?

She added: "That's dehumanization. And when
it spreads, it can be very hard to correct."

Impossible actually, not just when it spreads either.

Dr. Green is now among a growing group of conflict resolution
experts who are turning their focus on the United States, a country
that some have never worked on. They are gathering groups in
schools and community centers to apply their skills to help a
country - this time their own - where they see troubling trends.

And are just wasting their time, you watch,.

They point to dehumanizing political rhetoric - for example
President Trump referring to the media as "enemies of the
people," or to a caravan of migrants in Mexico as riddled
with criminals and "unknown Middle Easterners."

Corse nothing like that has ever happened before in the US, eh ?

Political violence has flared:

Bull****. You don't see as many lynchings as you did in
the past and nothing like the radical violent hippys either.

A gunman killed worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue
in October after ranting about a refugee agency.

Corse nothing like that ever happen with black churches previously, eh ?

That same week, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump
sent pipe bombs to a dozen of the president's critics.

Corse nothing like that happened in the 60s, eh ?

In 2017, an Illinois man steeped in left-wing politics
shot four people at a Congressional baseball practice.

Corse no one ever got lynched in the south, eh ?

"There are a lot of people who have been working internationally
who are calling me up and saying, 'Oh my gosh, what do we do?
We have to do something,'" said Elizabeth Hume, a former conflict
expert for the government, who is vice president of the Alliance for
Peacebuilding, a professional association for conflict prevention experts.

"We are seeing some serious red flags,"

But never noticed the previous ones.

she said, "things that make conflict experts like me really nervous."

Then best do the decent thing and slash your wrists or sumfin.

Conflict experts said while the United States is not nearly
in the dire state of some of the other countries they work
in, the resilience of American institutions was being tested.

Bull**** it is. It survived the Black Panthers, Simbionese Liberation
Army etc etc etc fine and will do with the current ones too.

And the deterioration of political stability is always gradual.

That's bull**** too.

"People are realizing we are not as exceptional as
we thought," Ms. Hume said of the United States.

Democracy rankers have taken note. The Fund for Peace,
a nonprofit that focuses on fragile states, declared the
United States the fourth-most-worsened country for
2018, after Qatar, Spain and Venezuela.

Then they are fools with the Ukraine and Syria alone.

In 2017, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the research division
of The Economist Group, downgraded the United States to a
"flawed democracy," from a "full democracy," citing declining popular
trust in government that began long before Mr. Trump's election.

Its always been a flawed democracy, ****wit. Same with all of them.

Daniel Noah Moses, director of educator programs for Seeds
of Peace, a nonprofit that began with work on the Middle East,
but recently has ramped up its focus on the United States, said
when he moved to America from Jerusalem in 2017, the
political climate seemed strangely familiar.

"I've been surprised by how similar it all is - the gaps in understanding,
the levels of emotion, the negation of 'the other,'" he said.

Wota ****wit.

Dr. Green's homegrown peace mission consisted of 18 people
from Leverett, a liberal enclave in western Massachusetts, and
11 people from eastern Kentucky. In three-day sessions in both
places, Dr. Green used tools from social psychology to probe
underneath politics. The goal was not to change minds, but to
broaden them, by getting the participants to see one another as people.

Wota packa ******s...

You're sposed to sit around in a circle holding
hands and chanting kum bay yah, stupid.

The beginning was bumpy. The initial overture for a meeting
with the Kentucky residents came from Jay Frost, a retired
corporate training consultant in Leverett who admits that
he did not think much of Trump voters at first.

Wota surprise.

"'Stupid' was the adjective I used,"
he said, explaining his early thinking.

He wrote in an email that he wanted to understand "how rural
white voters could possibly support such a vulgar, dystopian
presidential candidate," language he says he now regrets.

Then do the decent thing and top yourself.

==============
[PHOTO]
Dr. Green facilitated discussions with 18 people from
Leverett, a liberal enclave in western Massachusetts,
and 11 people from eastern Kentucky.
Credit: Chana Rose Rabinovitz
================================
Gwen Johnson, an education administrator, who was
part of the Kentucky group that received it, said two
people started to cry when it was read. But she didn't
take offense and decided to make the 15-hour trip in
a van to Massachusetts to explain to people there that
while some might have been mad starting in 2016,
she had been mad for most of her life.

Here, take this funky canvas jacket with extremely long sleeves.

"If these folks want to hear why I voted the way I voted, I'm
going to damn well tell them," she said. "That was my attitude."

And the people from Massachusetts seemed like eager suitors,
trying to get the Kentucky residents to agree to a date.

"They had such desperation," said Nell Fields, a community
health researcher from Whitesburg, Ky., said of the participants
from Massachusetts. "They are very well educated and I think
they've always been confident that they'll just carry people
along with their way of thinking. And suddenly, when it
didn't happen, they didn't hardly know what to do."

Top themselves is the best approach.

She said she got the feeling that "they were kind of doing a project
where at the end they would say, 'O.K., look, we fixed them.'"

When they finally met, in the fall of 2017 in Leverett, Dr. Green
applied a basic rule of psychology: Once people feel heard, their
dignity had been acknowledged and the facts of their lives taken
seriously, it is easier to take on harder topics like politics.

Wota ****ing wanka...

She decided to start with the things that people have in common. She
asked everyone to talk about their families, because "everybody has one."

Not everyone does, ****wit.

They sat in a circle in a white clapboard building surrounded by sheep
pastures and spoke, one by one. No interruptions were allowed.

You're sposed to be chanting kum bay yah, stupid.

"We have been groomed and educated to have lots of opinions,
but that all has to be set aside in dialogue," Dr. Green said. "It's
not about opinions, it's about profound listening."

Wota ****ing wanka. No surprise that she got
kicked out of the real problem areas of the world.

When talk did turn to politics, again in a circle one by one, they
managed to stay civil. They talked about Mr. Trump, immigration
and guns, but participants said they managed to avoid blowups.

Around the country, groups are using
listening to tackle the political divide.

Wota ****ing wanka...

Rachel Milner Gillers, a conflict resolution expert
who previously worked with the United Nations,
has been practicing with college students.

In one exercise, students from Georgetown University,
in Washington,and Radford University, in Southwest
Virginia, many with different political views, had to ask
curious questions of each other and simply repeat back
what they were hearing without giving opinions. This is
a technique sometimes used in marriage therapy. It
turned out to be very hard.

Pathetic, really.

"You had people turning red hearing what they were hearing," said
Ms. Milner Gillers, an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School.

It got easier as they got to know each other better. The same
was true for Dr. Green's group. They had a spirited debate
about guns over lunch in Kentucky. The people from Leverett
believed they were safer when no one had one. The
Kentuckians believed they were safer when everyone did.

To illustrate the point, Ms. Johnson pointed out that most of
the women in the restaurant - including her - had guns in
their purses. The people from Massachusetts were shocked.

Wota surprise.

Ms. Fields said the group was able to talk about hard things
because of what came befo the feeling that the other side had
heard them and that they had become, in a fundamental way, equals.

So they went out and bought guns for themselves.

"I think we all expected it to be a lot harder than it was," Ms.
Fields said. "I really learned that no matter how differently
we think or vote, if we take a moment to see the other
person for who they are, as somebody with a family
and a story, that made the hard stuff easier."

So stupid that the silly cow hasn't even noticed
that some don't have a ****ing family.

She added: "It was about having a hard conversation in a soft place."

Wota ****ing wanka...