I'm trying to get my analytical mind and my emotions to work together. They're not natural allies. My emotions scream at me "Run! No, Fight! No, Run!", and in the meantime my analytical mind says things like "Huh, that's interesting, what if we move the one..."
For most of my life, my analytical mind has treated my emotions with disdain. You know, pipe down, that's crazy talk, I'm trying to get some important work done here. At best any negotiation is not oriented towards a common good: No, you can't shave all the hair off one side of your body. This is the twentieth time you've asked me that today. Christ, how am I ever going to finish this Dostoevsky paper due tomorrow? Well... I guess it can't do any harm. If I let you do it, do you promise to leave me alone for a while? Sigh... fine, go ahead. My reason has not negotiated with terrorists, but I sure as hell have negotiated with terror.
Without my emotions ever having to say "See, I told you so", my analytical mind has started treating my emotions with respect. Respect means we can work together, not merely bargain with each other in bad faith.
I feel like it's important to figure out how we're different from them. For a lot of people, it's going to be very important, a foundational identity principle, to have things they can point to in order to emphasize our differences. If someone finds that necessary, okay. Me, I don't eat meat just because Hitler was a vegetarian.
What I'm doing is going back through stuff they did that I said "Oh, man, that will never work," because it was out of joint with the way I viewed the world, and re-evaluating. This was not a blind shot in the dark, this was the culmination of a strategy the Republican party has been pursuing at least for my entire lifetime, and to those people who say we need to learn more, we need to understand, this is where I am starting.
Our politics are, out of necessity, the politics of fear. We are all terrified, and we will remain so. But our goals are not the same as theirs, so though we use fear, we cannot use it in the same way. For our part, we cannot use fear when it undermines our values. For their part, fear, in coalition with hatred, are their core values. I can hear them sneering at what I've said right now. "The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules."
Today we are not abandoning our rules. Today we are making new rules for ourselves, because what we are going to need going forward is different from what we thought we needed as recently as last week. Today we treat our fear and our rage with the respect and honor they deserve.
