{"id":29599,"date":"2015-09-18T17:38:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T21:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=29599"},"modified":"2016-03-31T19:06:13","modified_gmt":"2016-03-31T23:06:13","slug":"how-to-lose-friends-and-influence-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2015\/09\/18\/how-to-lose-friends-and-influence-people\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Lose Friends and Influence People"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Ed Kilgore gets confessional<\/a>\u00a0in discussing Donald Trump\u2019s ugly failure\/refusal to counter starkly eliminationist Islamophobia<\/a> at a New Hampshire rally:<\/p>\n

\n

This issue is personal to me. I grew up in the Jim Crow South surrounded by bigots (though not, thank God, in my immediate family). Although I never gave them encouragement, I also wasn\u2019t exactly a profile in courage when it came to calling them out. And that silence can be habit-forming. Much more recently I was required to work with a certain Democratic operative who for all his technical virtues was privately crazy when it came to Muslims \u2014 thought they should all be expelled from the country! I may have mildly objected to his periodic explosions on the subject, but my basic reaction was to change the subject and get back to the project we were working on.<\/p>\n

I regret that now, and realize that while I certainly do not have Donald Trump\u2019s complicity in the climate of opinion in which anti-Muslim bigotry flourishes, we really shouldn\u2019t tolerate this crap, which is all around us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The key to that, I think, is his recognition that \u201csilence can be habit-forming\u201d \u2014 meaning it can also be character<\/em>-forming and soul<\/em>-forming. You\u2019re practicing, training yourself to become whatever it is you\u2019re becoming. Those habits stick. We become them.<\/p>\n

Silence also trains others and helps to shape who they become. Silence encourages them to continue on the path they\u2019re on, or even to pick up the pace. It reinforces their willingness to continue saying, thinking and promoting hateful ideas, reaffirming and buttressing those ideas in their minds and hearts. And thus silence does them an injustice, just as surely as it does an injustice to the not-present-to-speak-for-themselves targets of their bigotry.<\/p>\n

\"JSN\"<\/a>We shouldn\u2019t think of speaking up as a Big Deal. It doesn\u2019t really require a \u201cprofile in courage\u201d \u2014 or a great deal of courage at all. Nor does it require eloquent language or intricate thought, really, just one word: \u201cNo.\u201d You can add to that, elaborate a bit as necessary, but that\u2019s the key word. \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

And because that word is true,<\/em> it\u2019s solid ground. Solid ground doesn\u2019t really need to do<\/em>\u00a0much of anything to bring a bigot in free-fall to a painful halt.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bit of folk-wisdom that says you should never lend money to a friend unless you are willing to part with\u00a0one or the other for good \u2014 either the money or the friend. So it\u2019s important to decide ahead of time which one is more important to you. For me, the friend is usually more important, so I plan to keep\u00a0the friend by determining that I shouldn\u2019t plan on seeing that money again. (If it does come back, later, then\u00a0yay!<\/em> Bonus!)<\/p>\n

But something like that is also true when it comes to lending your integrity<\/em> to friends (or relatives, acquaintances, co-workers, fellow parishioners, potential voters, etc.). You need to be willing to part with one or the other because it may turn out that you\u2019ll only be able to keep one of them. If this friend\/acquaintance starts spouting something hateful and bigoted you need to decide if you\u2019re willing to part with your integrity \u2014 developing a habit of silence \u2014 in order to maintain the friendliness and collegiality you might have with that person. Or you can go the other way, the better way, and be willing to lose that friendliness and possibly that friend in order to speak up and, thereby, keep your soul.<\/p>\n

I think Norman Vincent Peale\u2019s famous sales pitch gets it backwards. We don\u2019t always influence people by making friends. We often have a greater influence on people by being willing to lose<\/em> friends.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing though \u2014 speaking up won\u2019t cost you as many friends as you might think. Sure, some hateful people are so utterly invested in and identified by their hate that they can\u2019t afford to associate with anyone who doesn\u2019t reinforce the lie. Speaking up will probably chase them away for good. Shake the dust off your feet and bid them good riddance. But with many others, speaking up and disagreeing with them will earn a measure of respect \u2014 begrudging respect, perhaps, but respect all the same. They\u2019ll know where you stand, and will recalibrate their friendship \u2014 and what they say around you \u2014 accordingly. But you\u2019ve paid them the compliment of speaking to them truthfully, and while they may never quite articulate that thought to themselves in quite that way, or think of it in such terms, they\u2019ll be grateful<\/em> you did so.<\/p>\n

* * * * * * * * * * * *<\/p>\n

Now, because this is the Internet, where things often get flamey, we should say one more thing.\u00a0A willingness to lose friends and friendliness doesn\u2019t mean an eagerness to do so. Losing friends should not be a goal in and of itself. \u201cSpeaking up\u201d shouldn\u2019t mean being a self-righteous jerk \u2014 because that, too, can be habit-forming and character-forming and soul-forming.<\/p>\n

What that means, in part, is that we should distinguish between insensitive statements and outright advocacy of violent bigotry, distinguish between careless mistakes and deliberate choices, distinguish between ignorance and wickedness. Some things need to be called out and condemned and castigated, other things merely need to be corrected. Conflating those two categories is akin to dishonesty.<\/p>\n

Paul Waldman provides a good example of making such distinctions, contrasting Donald Trump\u2019s silence\u00a0in response to\u00a0the bigotry of his supporters with John McCain\u2019s 2008 silencing\u00a0of a bigoted birther at a campaign event:<\/p>\n

\n

Many people were immediately reminded of\u00a0<\/span>the time\u00a0in 2008 when a woman at a McCain rally told the senator, \u201cI can\u2019t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he\u2019s not \u2014 he\u2019s an Arab.\u201d McCain took the mic from her and said, \u201cNo, ma\u2019am. He\u2019s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with.\u201d McCain got a lot of credit for standing up to her (even if I\u2019m sure he wouldn\u2019t say that one can\u2019t be both an Arab and a decent family man), knowing as he did that plenty of his supporters shared some version of her views.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

McCain got the important bit right: \u201cNo, ma\u2019am.\u201d But he also, as Waldman notes, stumbled a bit in his response by not challenging \u2014 and awkwardly almost reinforcing \u2014 the idea that calling someone \u201can Arab\u201d is a self-evident insult, a slur that indicates one is incapable of also being a citizen or a \u201cdecent family man.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCain needs to learn to do better on that latter bit. And that needs to be explained to him in a way that will challenge him (and, ideally, help<\/em> him)\u00a0not to repeat that mistake. But this fumbling bit of his response was also clearly just that \u2014 a mistake<\/em>. He made a mistake and implied something he did not intend to imply. Treating a mistake as indistinguishable from a crime is also a form of injustice and of hateful language. (Yes, as the slogan says, \u201cintent is not magic.\u201d But it does matter. Intent doesn\u2019t magically erase harm or consequences, but dismissing the significance of intent while simultaneously calling out someone for their intent<\/em> is foul play.)<\/p>\n

But while we shouldn\u2019t just let McCain\u2019s statement go, blessing it with silence, it would be supremely dishonest to treat his remark the same way as we do the deliberate, willful hate he was addressing. The same could be said, I think, for Ed Kilgore\u2019s unfortunate use of the word \u201ccrazy\u201d in characterizing his Islamophobic former-colleague. That\u2019s careless language that can be harmful, and it needs to be addressed, but it\u2019s in a different category than the kind of willfully hateful language Trump\u2019s New Hampshire supporter was using. And those different things merit a different kind of response.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a bit of folk-wisdom that says you should never lend money to a friend unless you are willing to part with one or the other for good — either the money or the friend. Something like that is true when it comes to lending your integrity to friends. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"How to Lose Friends and Influence People","description":"There's a bit of folk-wisdom that says you should never lend money to a friend unless you are willing to part with one or the other for good -- either the money or the friend. Something like that is true when it comes to lending your integrity to friends. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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