Why I do the things that I do (and ultimately why you should as well)

When I was in school, I was a member of the debate team.

Go ahead, you're allowed to laugh hysterically at the concept of me attempting to be eloquent, restrained and on topic for any length of time... but I have freaking TROPHIES.  So there.

The thought patterns I developed to excel at debate had a lasting effect on my brain.  It has a tendency to make things complicated and near impossible to have black and white opinions, but I feel like it opened up this whole new way of looking at the world and finding the humanity in polarizing topics.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

This is how a typical high school extemporaneous debate tournament works: Everyone arrives and finds out the topic at the same time.  The topic will typically be something thought provoking, but not overly controversial.  It's worded in the form of a specific question, let's say "Should uniforms be mandatory in public schools?"  Then you are given a certain length of time to start forming your arguments.  You're grouped with a partner, and you decide who will play what role.  A typical argument order is: 1st affirmative (in support of the  question), 1st negative, 2nd affirmative, 2nd negative.  In between each speech, the other team is given the opportunity to ask questions.  The negative position can have their own arguments, but their bigger goal is to make sure they rebutt all of the affirmative's arguments.  So while you're preparing, the only speech that you can write out ahead of time is the 1st affirmative speaker's.  The rest, you just have to formulate your arguments.  And the second speaker has no idea what they're going to be talking about, other than anticipating the other team's problems with your arguments.

Now, the important part of this is that you can't choose your sides.  Each team has to argue both for and against a topic once, and then the third debate is a coin flip to see which side you're arguing.  This is important because not only do you have to argue convincingly for or against statements that you might not personally agree with, but anytime that you think you have some killer argument that no one is going to be able to refute, you remember that in the next round, it's likely that you'll have to refute that argument when someone else makes it.  It was so frustrating!  In order to do well, you had to be strong on both sides, and argue just as passionately and convincingly.  I actually did really well at it and took home a bunch of speaker awards.  I liked to be in the 2nd speaker position and just crush everyone's arguments that they thought were sooo smart a minute ago.  

Actually, funny story regarding the debate tournaments... I had done debate in junior high, and had specifically requested some kind of debate club to form when I went to high school.  They actually did form one, so my freshman year of debate was the first time that my high school had ever competed in debate tournaments.  The teachers had researched the different debate styles (there's a lot of technical details regarding the layout of the arguments and the jobs of the various speakers and stuff), but they had never actually been to a tournament.  I went to high school in a town right outside of Hartford, and our school was thought of as pretty "ghetto".  So when we went to our first tournament, it was a slight amount of culture shock, because most of the schools we were competing against were the "fancy rich schools".  Different high schools would host the debates each time, and I forgot what town it was in the first time, but it was a rich area of the state, and it was like a bad movie cliche when we first walked in, dressed in Walmart skirts and fancy shoes purchased just for that day, and walking into a really gorgeous (and opulent) high school with all this new architecture and lack of blood spatter stains on the concrete... And just like the movie cliche, we knew we were out of our league, and well, we really bombed.  Largely due to lack of format knowledge and experience debating outside teams, there was a lot of confusion and it was kind of awkward, because we were clearly uneducated on some of the finer nuances of the style, but also some pretty major parts.  We all learned a lot that day and I know that the teachers felt bad for throwing us to the sharks like that.  Anyway, in pure New Britain style, once we realized we were horribly outclassed, some of the team members responded by being jackasses.  I remember this one guy stood up for his speech and said that his name was "Sharon Needles" and proceeded to ramble on for 5 minutes about his favorite flavor of cereal.  And not that I endorse jackassery, but the fancy schools were just so flapped that they had no idea what to do.  I know it put them in a bad position to now have to go up and pretend that everything was normal, but they just had *no* idea how to deal with our antics.  We were actually asked to not participate in the 3rd round, but to instead watch other people debate to see how it was supposed to be done.  I think the club lost like, 75% of their members after that.  There was no moral to that story, just remembered it as I was typing.

But my point is, is that years of debate taught me that *every* argument has two sides.  I was forced to restrain my desire to gloat when I thought of a new killer argument, but instead let out an exasperated sigh, because now I was going to HAVE to find a way to argue it anyway.  It taught me that no matter how passionately I believe something and how logical I think my arguments are and how ridiculous the other side is, there is another side that believes the opposite, just as passionately.  The kneejerk response is to just dismiss them as crazy people, but statistically, it's much more likely that they might have a few points.  Anytime you have a clear argument for something and don't immediately try to find the holes, it's lowering the quality of your arguments, because I guarantee that they have holes, and refusing to acknowledge them and proactively mend them doesn't make them not exist, it just throws away the opportunity to deal with them head on.  The most effective strategy in debate was to anticipate the other side's arguments, practically make them for them, and then refute them in the same breath, before they even had a chance to frame them the way they wanted to.  You had to admit your weaknesses to amplify your strength and control as many variables as possible.

I never see that happen in srs bsns political debates.  I never see it in any political talk shows or "news programs", on either side.  Whatever side is making the argument tends to take every cheap shot they can at anyone who would disagree.  They assert their strength by marginalizing anyone who would disagree and if you're on the fence, the natural inclination is to go along with what they're saying, otherwise you'd be a total idiot.  Or if you strongly disagree, you get mad and turn off the program, and you learn not to listen to them because they're being so ridiculous that it's just going to make you angry.  And I guess it's somewhat effective, otherwise Rush Limbaugh and Ed Schultz would be out of a job.  But what does it accomplish?  Any point that you've made is a waste of breath, because you've isolated your audience to those who agree with you and weaker minds that may agree with you, but they'll bastardize your points when they repeat them and just serve to make sure that only the most extreme, inflammatory positions are heard.  And that's cute, but progress is never made.  Both sides just get more and more riled up and frustrated, and those in the middle don't care enough to wade through all the crazy to get to the point.  

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." ~Aristotle

Anyone is welcome to any belief they'd like, and you can express it anywhere that you can find space, whether it's call in radio, internet forums, or sharing a snarky comic on Facebook.  But if you want your belief to actually accomplish something, if you want anything to actually get done, you have to be willing to accept that the opposing viewpoints aren't crazy, or stupid, or wrong.  Things are almost never black and white.  People believe things for a number of reasons, sometimes it's rooted in logic, sometimes it's rooted in emotion or personal experience, but that doesn't invalidate them.  If you stand any chance of convincing anyone of anything, you've got to come at it from a point of true empathy and understanding.   People who disagree with you still are people.  They have lives and family and inner demons and preferences and it's highly unlikely that they are, in fact, the actual devil.  They might be angry and afraid and full of baggage, they might have truly grating personality quirks, they might be uneducated and insulting, but they got to the point that they are at by the choices they've made in their life, and true mental illness aside, they probably made those decisions because they felt like it was a good idea and they felt comfortable in those choices.  And if you really can't imagine their life without a sense of disgust or anger or a running commentary of digs, you're probably not doing a very good job of imagining their life.   You have to drop your shields and live in their brain to truly appreciate, on a very visceral level, why they think what they do.  And if you truly are doing this, you might find that your beliefs might not be as "correct" as you had thought.  

"The test of first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you are of an opinion that believes that the only way to fix the world is with radical policy change, if you find yourself frequently being diametrically opposed to nearly every talking point of someone with an opposite view, if you can't list one genuinely good thing about someone you strongly disagree with, if you find yourself unable to disagree with someone without it quickly escalating to emotionally charged arguments, than I challenge you to make yourself more vulnerable and truly put yourself in their shoes.  This isn't a defeatist challenge, the point isn't to come around to a place of frozen neutrality, This is a challenge to strengthen your views, to fully explore the lives of those that disagree with you and potentially rework your ideas to minimize suffering on all sides.  Drop your arguments that are fueled by bias and resentment, because they'll only weigh you down and isolate you.  Don't let your opponent grab that low hanging fruit and poison ideas that could actively solve something.  KNOW YOUR SHIT.  I firmly believe that the world will be changed by the cumulative effect of individual interactions... exponential growth of good ideas... but no one will ever listen to you if you make the conscious decision to never question yourself.  Question *everything*.  

And if you ever get overwhelmed and don't know what to think, just ask me :)