In a fight, I am the good guy and you are the bad guy. I will do anything to win,
because I am right.
In a negotiation, we are both people and each of us makes an effort to understand why
we need to disagree. In a negotiation, we both win or we both lose. The prize that we
either win or lose is our ability to relate to one another, to share a world, to
recognize and respect the values of another, maybe to love one another.
Negotiation is quite unlike fighting.
A national economy is partly about how I’m going to pay my bills, but it’s me paying my
bills multiplied by about 300,000,000. It’s all of us paying our bills. Or–as is
often the case on both the personal and on the national scale–NOT paying our bills.
When we don’t pay our bills at the personal level, we get collection agencies, bad
credit reports, law suits, nasty letters and phone calls, wage garnishments and other
stuff that makes us feel like our lives are falling apart.
At the national level, it’s all of those things times three-hundred-million, except
that on the national level, we call it a budget deficit.
I suppose we don’t tend to think of it that way. I suppose we all assume that if the
government–um, which in the U.S. is actually US–runs out of money, they can just call
the treasury and have more money printed. The important thing to realize about money
is that–in and of itself–paper is not worth much. Our pieces of paper acquire value
by the significance of what is written on them. In the case of money, the pieces of
paper are literally “symbolic energy”. The value of money is directly linked to its
purchasing power, which decreases when you use more pieces of paper to represent the
same amount of stored energy. I know this might be a tricky concept, but understanding
tricky concepts is the actual key to understanding the things you don’t understand.
The Democratic party is about social programs that help us live. That’s a very important thing for a government to do.
In between the Democrats and the Republicans is the simple fact that stuff costs money and money doesn’t come from nowhere. In the U.S.the money that our government uses for social programs comes from US.
The Republican party is about keeping the cost of government to a minimum.
Each side has its positive and its negative aspects.
Fighting is fighting. In a fight, there will be winners and there will be losers.
That’s just the nature of fighting.
Negotiations aim for resolution in a way that fighting can’t.
I won’t tell you what should or shouldn’t be important to you.
I WILL ask you to think about how you resolve conflicts and I WILL hope that you choose to resolve conflicts in ways that allow us to recognize the realities of living together as people, families, groups, communities, nations, a world.
All I’ve ever asked of you is that you think.
