Lighthouse and Crossroads

In order to dispel any notion that by promoting unity/empathy/Ubuntu, the great leaders I mentioned previously are simply calling for the accommodation of our most profound beliefs/principles, I'd invite to to listen to or read President Obama's remarks at the 2009 Notre Dame Commencement.

For some context, when it was announced that the President would be the commencement speaker, anti-abortion activists on campus engaged in protests. But rather than dismissing them, President Obama went right to the heart of the matter and addressed the topic head on. It was a profound exhibition of strength, courage and empathy.


Here's how he concluded his speech.

And in this world of competing claims about what is right and what is true, have confidence in the values with which you’ve been raised and educated. Be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake. Hold firm to your faith and allow it to guide you on your journey. In other words, stand as a lighthouse.

But remember, too, that you can be a crossroads. Remember, too, that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It’s the belief in things not seen...

And this doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, cause us to be wary of too much self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open and curious and eager to continue the spiritual and moral debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame. And within our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us even as we cling to our faith to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works and charity and kindness and service that moves hearts and minds.

For if there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It’s no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the Golden Rule -- the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. The call to serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this Earth...

I will not pretend that the challenges we face will be easy, or that the answers will come quickly, or that all our differences and divisions will fade happily away -- because life is not that simple. It never has been.

But as you leave here today, remember the lessons of Cardinal Bernardin, of Father Hesburgh, of movements for change both large and small. Remember that each of us, endowed with the dignity possessed by all children of God, has the grace to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we all seek the same love of family, the same fulfillment of a life well lived...

If nothing else, that knowledge should give us faith that through our collective labor, and God’s providence, and our willingness to shoulder each other’s burdens, America will continue on its precious journey towards that more perfect union.

The Heart of the Matter

When most people talk about globalization and income inequality, the talk about policies to alleviate the problem. That is an important part of the equation. But Pope Francis recently addressed the heart of the matter.

I recognize that globalization has helped many people to rise from poverty, but it has condemned many others to hunger. It's true that in absolute terms it grows world wealth, but it also increased the disparity and the new kinds of poverty.

What I notice is that this system is maintained with the culture of waste, of which I have already spoken several times. There is a politics, sociology, and also an attitude of rejection.

When at the center of the system there is not anymore man but money, when money becomes an idol, men and women are reduced and simply instruments of a social system and an economy characterized, indeed dominated by deep imbalances.

That reminded me of something David Simon said a few years ago when he talked about why he created the HBO series The Wire.

We are in the postindustrial age. We do not need as many of us as we once did. We don’t need us to generate capital, to secure wealth. We are in a transitive period where human beings have lost some of their value. Now, whether or not we can figure out a way to validate the humanity of the individual, I have great doubts...

The Wire is certainly an angry show. It’s about the idea that we are worth less. And that is an unreasonable thing to contemplate for all of us. It is unacceptable. And none of us wants to be part of a world that is going to do that to human beings. If we don’t exert on behalf of human dignity at the expense of profit and capitalism and greed, which are inevitabilities, and if we can’t modulate them in some way that is a framework for an intelligent society, we are doomed. It is going to happen sooner than we think. I don’t know what form it will take. But I know that every year America is going to be a more brutish and cynical and divided place.

And finally, I was reminded of what Derrick Jensen wrote in The Culture of Make Believe when he talked about the similarities between hate groups and corporations.

He said, "They're cousins."

I just listened.

"Nobody talks about this," he said, "but they're branches from the same tree, different forms of the same cultural imperative..."

"Which is?"

"To rob the world of its subjectivity."

"Wait - " I said.

"Or to put this another way," he continued, "to turn everyone and everything into objects."

Robbing the world of its subjectivity means removing empathy and our feelings of mutuality. It means creating distance between "us" and "them." It is also what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was addressing when he said this:

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

When people accuse President Obama of being too accommodating with his opponents (liberals accuse him of being too accommodating with Republicans and conservatives accuse him of the same thing with global opponents), they fail to see that this is exactly the challenge he is attempting to address.

Here's how candidate Obama talked about it back in 2008 on Martin Luther King Day.

Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny...

We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don’t think like us or look like us or come from where we do...

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media...

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others - all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face - war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.

Here's how he talked about it on a global scale during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more -- and that's the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there's something irreducible that we all share.

The President reminded us of this when he memorialized Nelson Mandela.

Mandela understood the ties that bind the human spirit. There is a word in South Africa- Ubuntu – that describes his greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us...He not only embodied Ubuntu; he taught millions to find that truth within themselves. It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailor as well; to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion, generosity and truth. He changed laws, but also hearts.

There are those that say Ubuntu is impossibly naive and unrealistic. To them, I simply respond:

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us (John Lennon, Pope Francis, David Simon, Derrick Jensen, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, President Obama)
And the world will live as one.

Wall Street and Main Street: Our inescapable network of mutuality

I believe that one of the problems with a lot of liberals is that they focus too much on the enemy. Looking at the treatment of our financial system and the 1%ers by them is often instructive. The rhetoric is all tied up in calls for retribution and defeat of the enemy.

In saying that, I am in no way attempting to excuse the injustices. They are very real. But if we are going to address them, we must maintain our North Star - a focus on who we are fighting FOR.

I am often struck by the approach of leaders from the past that we revere...people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. Both of those men led movements against oppression far beyond what we experience today. I believe that much of what guided them can be summed up in these words Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

It is the same grounding that President Obama acknowledged as the basis for what made Mandela such a powerful leader.

There is a word in South Africa- Ubuntu – that describes his greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us...It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailor as well; to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion, generosity and truth.

Mutuality and Ubuntu are not merely statements of sentimentality. We now know that they are well-grounded in the science of everything from biology to economics. A simple focus on retribution against our enemies ultimately affects all of us. Whether or not we are willing to heed King's call to "love our enemies," we have to at least take that into account.

While I might not agree with every action taken by President Obama and his administration in the midst of the Great Recession, it is clear that they were guided by an awareness of the economic mutuality between Wall Street and Main Street. They knew that "whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." That is exactly what is meant by the idea of "too big to fail." Even as we are justified in decrying how we got there, no one can deny that a "failure" would have had catastrophic effects on everyone - not just Wall Street.

And so here we are six years later and the immediate crisis is over. We're back to dealing with the growing income inequality that has been building for over 30 years. Liberals whose primary focus is on defeating the enemy seem more resentful of money being made on Wall Street than they are in figuring out what to do for Main Street.  I suspect that what drives that is an assumption that if Wall Street suffers Main Street will prosper. To me, that is just another example of assuming that the master's tools will be able to dismantle the master's house. It is the master's way to pit one group against another...divide and conquer...survival of the fittest.

Ultimately what will dismantle the master's house of income inequality is a recognition of the fact that "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." That means that we demonize neither the poor or the rich, nor do we call for their defeat. Instead, we begin to imagine how we can "free not just the prisoner, but the jailor as well."

Desperado

If I had to pick one song that is my number one favorite of all time, it would probably be this one:


The whole thing is packed with wisdom, but think about this line for a moment.

Freedom, oh freedom, well that's just some people talking. Your prison is walking through this world all alone.

I initially fell in love with this song when I had come to care very deeply for a young woman I was working with in a group home who was experiencing all the pain and hunger that come with being a desperado. She, like many other teenagers, clouded her pain in a desperate cry for freedom.

But I think we can broaden the application of this song and think about it as a lament for much of our political discourse these days. We're constantly subjected to cries from the libertarians and conservatives about "FREEDOM." I don't necessarily have a problem with that. But as an emphasis that excludes our need (as human beings) for each other, it is just another prison of its own kind.

This is a theme to which President Obama constantly returns.

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government.

Whatever name we chose to give it: citizenship, empathy, ubuntu,  e pluribus unum, expanded moral conscious - I believe that this is the defining issue of our time. The cultural march towards individualistic independence that was once a healthy development is beginning to show its limits. Its time to climb down from our fences and open the gate.

And so I say to America: You better let somebody love you, before its too late.

What the wonks among us don't get

Yesterday Ezra Klein launched his new media venture Vox. His opening piece of writing is a doosey titled: How Politics Makes Us Stupid.

There’s a simple theory underlying much of American politics. It sits hopefully at the base of almost every speech, every op-ed, every article, and every panel discussion...It’s what we might call the More Information Hypothesis: the belief that many of our most bitter political battles are mere misunderstandings. The cause of these misunderstandings? Too little information...If only the citizenry were more informed, the thinking goes, then there wouldn’t be all this fighting.

It’s a seductive model. It suggests our fellow countrymen aren’t wrong so much as they’re misguided, or ignorant, or — most appealingly — misled by scoundrels from the other party. It holds that our debates are tractable and that the answers to our toughest problems aren’t very controversial at all...

But the More Information Hypothesis isn’t just wrong. It’s backwards. Cutting-edge research shows that the more information partisans get, the deeper their disagreements become.

This one is right up my alley because its something I think about all the time. Perhaps because I spent over 20 years questioning the religious orthodoxy under which I was raised, I am particularly fascinated with our human ability to fool ourselves into maintaining our belief systems in the face of evidence.

Not too long ago I wrote about scientific research that labelled this tendency motivated reasoning.

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds...It’s a “basic human survival skill,” explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close.

What Klein adds to this discussion is the work of Yale Law Professor Dale Kahan who helps us understand what motivates this emotional response to threatening information.

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

I am reminded of something Sarah Robinson wrote about honoring the process of those who abandon an authoritarian mindset.

We must never, ever underestimate what it costs these people to let go of the beliefs that have sustained them. Leaving the safety of the authoritarian belief system is a three-to-five year process. Externally, it always means the loss of your community; and often the loss of jobs, homes, marriages, and blood relatives as well. Internally, it requires sifting through every assumption you've ever made about how the world works, and your place within it; and demands that you finally take the very emotional and intellectual risks that the entire edifice was designed to protect you from. You have to learn, maybe for the first time, to face down fear and live with ambiguity.

That is a daunting task to ask anyone to undertake - and almost impossible to do alone.

In many ways Kahan is right - protecting who we are and our relationship with those we love and trust IS more important than facts and data. As human beings we can't survive without it. That kind of reality leaves a wonk like Ezra Klein pretty despondent as he tries to find a solution to the gulf that separates us.

Its interesting - because my mind immediately went to this:


The answer isn't - as Kahan suggests - a better "science communication strategy." It starts with broadening the definition of "we,"...an expansion of our moral imagination. When we make our circle of concern big enough to include even those we disagree with - facts are no longer a threat to our identity. It is captured by the African concept of Ubuntu.

Mandela understood the ties that bind the human spirit. There is a word in South Africa - Ubuntu – that describes his greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us...He not only embodied Ubuntu; he taught millions to find that truth within themselves. It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailor as well; to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion, generosity and truth. He changed laws, but also hearts.

Overcoming the empathy deficit

A theme emerges when you pay attention. Can you spot it?

President Obama on "expanding our moral immagination:"

Bernice Johnson Reagon on coalition politics:

We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is “yours only”—just for the people you want to be there...To a large extent it’s because we have just finished with that kind of isolating. There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up...

It must become necessary for all of us to feel that this is our world. And that we are here to stay and that anything that is here is ours to take and to use in our image. And watch that “ours’ make it as big as you can...The “our” must include everybody you have to include in order for you to survive. You must be sure you understand that you ain’t gonna be able to have an “our” that don’t include Bernice Johnson Reagon, cause I don’t plan to go nowhere! That’s why we have to have coalitions. Cause I ain’t gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the possibility that we can both live—if you can stand it.

David Simon on the death of normal:

America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance...

We are all the other now, in some sense. Special interests? That term has no more meaning in the New America. We are all — all of us, every last American, even the whitest of white guys — special interests. And now, normal isn’t white or straight or Christian. There is no normal. That word, too, means less with every moment. And those who continue to argue for such retrograde notions as a political reality will become less germane and more ridiculous with every passing year.

This is the reality that is creating such a backlash from the white male patriarchy. The world as we've known it is evolving and, as Simon goes on to say, "change is a motherfucker when you run from it."

So the question becomes: how do we as a society prepare ourselves for that kind of change? I am struck in all this by some of the writing Jim Stuart has been doing on integral development theory. In the past, I've studied things like Kohlberg's stages of moral development and Bennett's work on a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. While each of these models has its own unique focus, a common theme is that development and growth requires increasing levels of empathy. In order to face the changes in our individual lives, in our country, and around the globe, that is the challenge that awaits us.

Its clear to me that years ago President Obama came to the same conclusion.

“Unity is the great need of the hour.” That’s what Dr. King said. It is the great need of this hour as well, not because it sounds pleasant, not because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exits in this country.

I’m not talking about the budget deficit. I’m not talking about the trade deficit. I'm talking about the moral deficit in this country. I’m talking about an empathy deficit, the inability to recognize ourselves in one another, to understand that we are our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper, that in the words of Dr. King, “We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”

If you'd like more, the folks at the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy have put together a video that is almost 2 hours long of all the times Barack Obama has talked about the need to nurture empathy.

Over the years I've learned a lot from watching President Obama. Most of the time learning involves being challenged - and understanding what it means to "expand my moral imagination" (iow, developing empathy) is one of those times. To do so requires a confidence in our own sense of self that allows us to be curious about the "other." Expanding our moral imagination also means letting go of the confines of our own understanding of the world and being open to something that is currently beyond our imagination. Here's how Nezua talked about that.

...life is not like a series of books in a course on …anything. It fluctuates. We fluctuate. We are not a being, but a becoming, as Friedrich once said. And sometimes ideas are hammered out and we draw lines and walls and are told we fall on one side or the other and so do our thoughts and so does all that follows from them…and so it goes. We buy into these illusory borders, too...

I am far more comfortable navigating the in-between than I am in any Place. I like no thing as much as the coming and going from one to another. It is on the purpling beaches of dusk and the roseing gauze of dawn that my true eye shines lidless and I see so much more than in broad daylight. In the falling away of my tired husk I remember my shape can only be held temporarily. And to cling too tightly to it is to rot.

Being sure is but the borderwall we place around a heart to ward off the skinstripping wind of the next living moment.

We are currently facing that "skinstripping wind of the next living moment" as described by President Obama, Bernice Johnson Reagon and David Simon above. The intransigence of surety is what will prevent us from developing the empathy that is required in this moment. Expanding our moral imagination is what will allow our true eye to shine.

Understanding why some people can't "see" Ubuntu

In describing President Obama as an integral leader, Jim Stuart recently wrote this:

On balance, most of us in the US and elsewhere have a binary view of conflict: if you win, I lose, and vice versa. And we are completely immersed in the consciousness of scarcity, resource conflict, and fear of the other. Clearly, Gandhi, Mandela and King operated from a different level of consciousness, where abundance, peacemaking, and trust were the qualities seen first, and were part of each leader's basic operating system. Developmental psychologists call this level of consciousness integral, and tell us that less than 5% of the world has attained this consciousness level. Obama, I believe, is part of this small percentage of people who see things whole...

...none of this makes sense to our pundits - that operational mode doesn't compute - power is everything; the powerful are always the winners; never let your guard down; he who has the gold rules, etc, - so folks just cannot see it when something like what has just happened, occurs.

I want to credit Jim with helping me understand that some people literally cannot "see" what is happening. Yesterday I ran across a perfect example of this in commentary about the life of Nelson Mandela. It came from something written by Ted Rall, the cartoonist that was accused at Daily Kos of depicting President Obama as a gorilla/monkey. I'll warn you...its probably going to make you angry. Go ahead and let yourself react. But then take a moment to think about what he literally can't see.

Many black South Africans are disillusioned by Mandela and his ANC government. Residents of the townships are suffering horribly, yet this “black” “democratic” government hasn’t done much more for them than the old apartheid regime. This was due to two terrible decisions by Mandela in 1994. First, he decided against seeking justice against the apartheid-era criminal whites. Obviously this was the result of pressure from the USA and the West. The ANC called it “reconciliation.” Others called it a sellout. These horrible murderers got away with murder. The lesson to the murderers of the future is, don’t worry, you won’t pay for your crimes.

Second, Mandela and the ANC decided not to implement the communist programme of their socialist and communist allies. Income and wealth redistribution were left on the table. The result is a South Africa that looks the same as before: rich whites, poor blacks. Heckuva job, Nelson.

You have to wonder if Rall even saw the outpouring of love for Madiba from black South Africans over the last few days when he suggests that they are "disillusioned" by him. For an entirely different take on all that, please go read how Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses these same arguments when they come from conservatives. But I'll let that one go for now.

It is clear that Rall has absolutely ZERO ability to understand Ubuntu...the African concept that President Obama described this way:

...his [Mandela's] recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us.

It got me to thinking about Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development. Here's how I'd break it down:

Ted Rall : Stage Four - "A central ideal or ideals often prescribe what is right and wrong, such as in the case of fundamentalism. If one person violates a law, perhaps everyone would—thus there is an obligation and a duty to uphold laws and rules. When someone does violate a law, it is morally wrong; culpability is thus a significant factor in this stage as it separates the bad domains from the good ones."

Nelson Mandela: Stage Six - "moral reasoning is based on abstract reasoning using universal ethical principles. Laws are valid only insofar as they are grounded in justice, and a commitment to justice carries with it an obligation to disobey unjust laws...This involves an individual imagining what they would do in another’s shoes, if they believed what that other person imagines to be true. The resulting consensus is the action taken. In this way action is never a means but always an end in itself; the individual acts because it is right, and not because it avoids punishment, is in their best interest, expected, legal, or previously agreed upon."

Al Giordano made a similar argument when discussing how liberals who are entrenched in stage four moral development made the argument that President Obama MUST prosecute Bush/Cheney for torture.

There are times when “The Law” is dressed up in liberal language in a way that masquerades the bloodlust behind witch hunts and impulses to scapegoat individuals for crimes or taboos that, in a democracy, we’re all responsible for having enabled.

The same tendencies that have always placed me squarely against McCarthyism and Red Scares put me on the opposite side of some liberal and progressive colleagues today when they demand the prosecution of Bush, or of Cheney, or of some of their underlings...

In the end, preventing torture is a political struggle and also a power struggle, so much more than a matter of "The Law." It’s about changing society and its presumptions, and changing institutions, like the military and police agencies, where the culture is so prone to that kind of abuse.

Giordano makes the case that ultimately it is in the spirit of Ubuntu that we will effectively dismantle the structures that support atrocities like torture. And that is exactly the approach Madiba took when seeking reconciliation with those who committed similar atrocities under the apartheid regime.

What I've come to see from all this is that there is a reason we come to loggerheads when trying to discuss these issues. Gawd knows that I have tried and failed more times than I'd like to remember. I'm thinking that it sounds patronizing to posit that those who don't understand are operating from a lower stage of moral development. It goes against the grain of humility that I've been talking about lately.

But the truth is, those stages of moral development - while not a perfect theory (no system that attempts to capture human behavior is perfect) - are based on tested scientific observation. In other words, they at least begin to describe the human condition. There doesn't have to be prejudice in applying them to human behavior. So as long as we come to a conversation like this with a good dose of humility in our own limitations, understanding the conflicts in this way actually releases us from the attachment to win/lose, either/or and allows us to understand. That's what I'm working on "seeing"... in the spirit of Ubuntu.