Well, that was definitely not how I expected last week to turn out. I went to sleep with a delighted smile on my face the night of Georgia's epic Senate election victories,… and by mid-morning the next day there was an attempted coup by a violent mob of Trump supporters wearing racist, anti-semitic shirts and waving the confederate flag in the halls of our nation's Capitol building while many Capitol police ushered them in or idly stood aside.

Bouncing between the NY Times, MSNBC and Twitter, I saw a tweet from a woman who realized that a guy she knew from college had been a part of the insurrection. She was shocked. She thought that because he graduated from a university with a good reputation and worked a successful white-collar job, that he would know better than to join up with a group of white supremacists. She thought he would know better than to try to violently overthrow the government.

I tried to find the post again but it's sadly lost to the bottomless pit of the internet. Nevertheless, her message emphasizes how important it is to talk to your people, especially the smart, good-looking, successful ones that you just know would never do something like this. There were a lot of educated (different from "smart"), professionally successful people who were a part of that mob. I wonder how many of their friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, exes, colleagues, acquaintances, and neighbors knew that this was where their minds and hearts were before it happened.

Talk to the folks you know who secretly or not-so-secretly harbor bigoted thinking. Listen to them. Try to reason with them. Check out this Vox article about how to talk someone out of bigotry. It even has a demo video to show how it works. Here's an excerpt:

"Instead of pelting voters with facts, "we ask open-ended questions and then we listen," Dave Fleischer, the LGBTQ rights organizer who developed the technique, told me in 2016. “And then we continue to ask open-ended questions based on what they just told us.” The idea is that people learn lessons more durably when they come to the conclusion themselves, not when someone “[slaps] you with a statistic,” Fleischer said. It is stories, not facts, that are most compelling to people when they’re changing their minds."

Think of a couple people you know that you're not quite sure where they stand when it comes to this issue — or maybe you already know where they stand, but you've been too scared or uncomfortable to initiate a conversation about it. Realize that although the conversation might be uncomfortable for you, it might just be the thing that helps to save them from falling further into deeper levels of bigotry, hatred, and violence. 

If you're afraid to bring it up in real time and want to write a letter or card to reach out and initiate the conversation, you're welcome to join us at Connection Club to do it. It's a safe, welcoming space to connect with other heart-centered people using the power of writing to say the things that must be said.

However you decide to move forward, be brave. You can do this.

XOXO

Kat